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FAQ [Foire aux questions] - Psychiatry today
2007
JULIEN PREVIEUX
Painting
75 x 90 cm each
Acrylic on canvas, 29,5 x 35,4 inches each, series of 11 canvas, 2007.
Thiscollection of “abstract” paintings presents a choice of geometrical shapesassociated with different statements. The combinations are borrowings from thecovers of social science books from the 1970s, but with the text / imagerelationship reversed: it is no longer the image that illustrates the title,but the text which serves as a caption for the image. This reappropriation ofgraphic material itself inspired by a certain artistic avant-garde refuses tochoose between formulation,formalisation and formalism. Does this connecting ofvocables with a system of shapes signal accumulation of knowledge or mereoverinterpretation? To what extent can an abstract motif model questions likeeducation, sexual deviation, contemporary psychiatry, economics and the publicinterest?
Born in Grenoble, works in Paris.
work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-arttechnologies and the culture industry are the many ‘worlds’ that Julien Prévieux’sactivities involve. As in the Lettres de non-motivation (Letters of Non-Appli-cation) that he has been sending out to employers regularly since 2004 – inwhich he responds to newspaper advertisements and details his reasons for notapplying for the jobs in question – his work often appropriates the vocabulary,mechanisms and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed, thebetter to highlight their dogmas, excesses and, when all is said and done,their vacuousness. By shrewdly adopting the stance of an individual facingwhole swathes of society that are, in many respects, dehumanised, Prévieuxdevelops a strategy of counterproductivity, or what the philosopher Elie Duringcalled, in a recent essay about the artist’s praxis, ‘counter-employment’.
Christophe Gallois, curator of the Mudam, Luxembourg
Artworks of
JULIEN PREVIEUX
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