Les idiots dans la clairière
Galerie Laroche/Joncas
"The so-called intelligence that people stick into their heads like a knife gives only a superficial image, and this intelligence must be destroyed. Idiocy must be shared, because in it exist all the other forces, like a wild will, a vital feeling gone mad, and perhaps an entirely different knowledge."
Joseph Beuys, in Beuys, Kounellis and Cucchi
Let's build a cathedral
To act stupid is to ignore the things we know so as not to be contaminated by consensus, but it is also to take a position of protest against norms. Descartes plays the idiot when he questions all his knowledge to arrive at his only certainty: "I think, therefore I am." Copernicus also plays the idiot when he rejects the geocentric conception of the universe to prove that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun. Seen in this way, idiocy has often been used in a search for truth, but I would rather understand it as a way of creating, as the gesture of refusing the tyranny of consensus. Annihilate categories to discover singular treasures and animate them.
The idiots in my works are characters who invent themselves, who define themselves. They turn their backs on conventions and adopt new behaviors. They do not seek the truth as Descartes and Copernicus did. They take the liberty of becoming mutants whose transformation resembles a journey determined by the sole intention of getting lost in order to discover the unknown. From this random wandering come new intrinsic logics which, brought to light in the clearing that is the gallery, will begin to connect to the common world to change its rules.
To create is to act stupid by venturing, at night, into the chaos of the wild forest. To present one's works is to come out of it and exhibit oneself naked in the middle of the clearing to propose a strange game whose rules are not yet completely defined. But acting stupid is also for me a committed stance in the face of mass culture that confuses work and consumer product. The monoculture of these insipid entertainment objects whose obsolescence is programmed creates erosion and impoverishes the soil. To use Hannah Arendt's words, they are hot sand winds, those that come to install the desert.
But the clearing is always green. And fools play funny games.
