Éric Duyckaerts at MAC/VAL
Much has been said about this artist and his oeuvre: brilliant speaker, enigmatic theorist, mysterious scientist, clownish savant. So who is Éric Duyckaerts, exactly? Hard to say, because this man of a thousand faces won’t be pinned down by his own words. His thought is slippery, his statements skip freely from one field of learning to another. Everything is incredibly credible, irrespective of the subject at hand. The idea is that you start with commonly accepted truths and end with absurdities, in a continuous line of reasoning. He can easily segue from 1 over 2 equals 3 over 6 to something like an olive plus a Camembert equals the ONU flag plus a horn of plenty. True or false? The spectator doesn’t have time to ask that kind of question. And who cares, since all of it is convincing! Éric Duyckaerts proposes an odyssey across the universe of knowledge, an unexpected marriage of art with science. For his first solo show in a French institution, Duyckaerts presents a set of new videos, as well as new objects, sculptures, wall paintings, screen prints and mosaics.
Until 5 June.
MAC/VAL, Place de la libération, 94404 Vitry-sur-Seine. RER C Vitry-sur-Seine. www.macval.fr/
