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Avant-garde

(2012) Print on duratrans paper
118x175 cm.


The point of departure for this work is context of the exhibition whose analysis provides the artist with various points of reference.

With preparing the show in the public space and setting it on the billboards, Aurélien Mole decides to be an echo of the type of images who dominate our everyday space : publicitary posters. In this field, photography plays the main role because the products are presented to be sold. This fact imposes the use of the idealised picture who presents the perfect object hiding behind its real fragility and this becomes the source of perpetual consumption. Producers want to deepen the contrast between the object and its powerfull representation so that its quick deterioration assures another purchase.

That is why the artist decides to examine the link between the object and its photographic representation. He presents the reproductions of the objects in the full scale on the publicitary billboards. Sweets, PolaroÏd, book, election poster are showed in the neutral way instead of being innapproachably perfect. The point is that the fact of prolonged exposure to the dayligh will destroy them anyway. The power of the light which is essential for making a print here is showed the other way round, as a destructive power.

The posters will be exhibited for about six weeks. It is then likely that UV rays, changing weather conditions or maby even intraction with the public will affect and finally destroy them. The artist supposes though that the destruction of the prints will be less brutal than the the objects themselves when put in the same conditions.

Through this experience, Aurélien Mole pursuits his interest for the « ageing » of the images and highlights the question of the materiality of the print.

Final issue is that the artist introduces irregularity to our everyday visual experience who most commonly is passive cause we treat publicitary posters as a part of our environment. In this way this mysterious avant-garde placed around the city hall’s garden brings out the question of how we experience images, how they affect our reality and the way we understand it.

Paul Frèches