François Seigneur
Des Ordres
11 December 2009–24 January 2010
Opening: 11 December 2009, 6:30pm
Curator: Larys Frogier
Works produced by La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art
Rennes, France
An architect by profession, François Seigneur works via an atypical overlapping of visual art and architecture. Combining painting, installations, graphic design, exhibition design and architecture, he practises a philosophy of the “open-ended” work: never definitive and often tweaked.
His exhibition at La Criée centres on the fabrication of disorder as both a necessary concept and an indispensable creative act; and this in a post-global era in which control, an obsession with security, and systems of assessment infiltrate the least discursive, administrative, social and even artistic system.
This is why François Seigneur’s work stresses the need for architecture and the visual arts to risk addressing areas of habitat and of forms, objects and concepts usually dismissed as not very “sexy”, insufficiently “formulated” or too “disorderly”. For it is in these areas that life and creativity often surface. La Criée is presenting a randomly structured Grey Macro-monochrome whose system of rearrangeable plywood panels triggers changes of aspect in the course of the exhibition. In contrast with this work, the installation Lucky There’s Advertising clutters the space with consumer (and consumed) items.
In the small room the exhibition is rounded off with an architectural model titled So as not to die, I won’t finish my house. So why finish other people’s?
As François Seigneur puts it, “Order and disorder are relative, complementary, indissociable states. Whether geometrical, temporal or human, they run our societies. If order within order leads to authoritarianism, unrestrained disorder leads to anarchy. The exhibition offers three possible states.”
