Yves Chaudouët : La Bibliothèque Fantastique

Ce livre a été publié à l'occasion de l'exposition:
This book has been publish for the exhibition:
Séparés, on est ensemble (cristallisation)
at Christophe Daviet-Thery
34 rue Louse Weiss 75013 Paris
6 April – 7 May 2011
Opening show the 6 April from 6.00 to 9.00 pm

Raising sameness
What have we here? Anything noteworthy? Anything new? Not this time. On the contrary, Yves Chaudouët has elected to raise sameness to a higher plane. That is, to raise the issue of sameness, the stakes of sameness, and above all to raise, literally, physically yet almost imperceptibly, sameness per se. So what has he done? An “intervention” as artists say, but one so infinitesimal as to be well nigh invisible, refreshingly free of any vestiges of “creativity” or “expressiveness”. Everything that was already in the gallery — the minimalist plinth, the pared-down display case — is still there; and conversely, everything still in the gallery was already there, yet everything has somehow been slightly raised – in a sort of Hegelian moment of lifting perception to a higher plane without eliminating anything. The effect is not (merely) conceptual, but elegantly real. Chaudouët had artisan glassmakers produce a series of crystal stems for wineglasses, but without the drinking cup; gracefully robust little stems, designed to withstand the weight of the gallery furniture that the artist has placed upon them. Or more precisely, beneath which he has discretely tucked the stems. The levitation effect produced by the encounter of two highly different aesthetic contrivances – the wineglass stem and the Judd-like furnishings – raises, at least to my mind, the issue of the utterly unique ontological shift which art has undergone in recent times. A double ontological status whereby art can be both what it is – the self-same object or action – and a proposition (that is, an artistic proposition) of that same thing. And Chaudouët has done so without the mannerism of ostentatiously not-doing yet without further encumbering the world with art objects. The gallery becomes, irreversibly one might contend, and at any event inseparably, both what it is, and a proposition of same. A minimal augmentation within sameness.
Stephen Wright, 2011.