Crystal Maze IV

1 + 2 + 3 = 3
Notre distraction favorite

Nouveau Festival
Centre Pompidou

Paris
20.02.2013 to 11.03.2013

At the invitation of Catherine de Smet and Bernard Blistène for the fourth Nouveau Festival at the Centre Pompidou and echoing the work of Pierre Faucheux (1924-1999), graphic designer and art director whose plethoric career span from the 1950s to the late 1980s, this Crystal Maze is an exhibition devised on the principle of montage. It brings together the works of creators understood as the trace of a visual desire finding release in the use and defamiliarization of images.

Curated by:

The exhibition proposal is enriched by a series of conferences, discussions and films programmation altogether forming a Crystal of which the spectator is invited to observe each facet. The arrangement of the various work of art and the multiple events accompanying this proposal are exposing a visual culture and processes common to a number of graphic designers, artists, photographers and filmakers, which work spread from the early 20th century until today and could be the object of rapprochements, sometimes unexpected, on both their visual and conceptual aspects.

The aim is not to undercover borrowings (which, when existing, are often mutual), nor to establish any genealogy between various pratices but rather to reveal how certain works, which closeness is sometimes obvious, sometimes forced, can share a number of common references or shared protocols and how they can together constitute a part of our contemporary visual culture.

The outlines of this visual culture have been identified through the work of graphic designer Pierre Faucheux, in particular his ‘écartelages’ and the cover design done by him and his atelier for the Livre de Poche. These works are often based on loan iconography and processes such as ripping, cut-up, collage, montage, colorization : many sensible and graphic operations defamiliarizing images and offering them new meanings and for which the work of Pierre Faucheux constitutes an inexhaustible matrix.

The use of notions like topology and territory underlines to which extent space, in its multiple acceptances, is inextricable from Faucheux’s work. He encounters Le Corbusier in 1947 and won’t then cease, during all of his career, to circulate between his graphic design expertise and his architectural practice (exhibition design and collaborations with architects). Defining himself as a ‘book architect’ and a ‘writer of space’, Faucheux has observed all of his life a kind of Écart absolu (Absolute interval) to bounce back on the title of the 11th International Surrealist Exhibition held in 1965 and for which Faucheux was the scenographer at the invitation of André Breton.

With: