Fictionary - Episode 1, 2 and 3
Collective show with Virginie Barré, Denis Brun, Philippe Charles, Frédéric Clavère, Anne de Sterk, Jim Lambie, Cyril Lepetit, Stéphanie Majoral, Ingrid Mourreau, Bruno Peinado and Laurent Terras
With live performances by DJ Jive Biquette and Cyril Lepetit, and a “clothing action” by Denis Brun.
Exhibition in partnership with 3015.
Curation: Philippe Charles (3015) and Sandra Patron (Triangle France)
Episode 1: September, 22 - 23, 2000
Episode 2: September, 29 - 30, 2000
Episode 3: October, 6 - 7, 2000
Friche la Belle de Mai, 13003, Marseille
Fictionary, a three-part serial where myths and legends, Bataille and Hitchcock, multiple-entry narratives, improbable scenarios and erotic tales intertwine.
In Latin, fiction comes from the word fingere, meaning to feign, manipulate, imagine. The essence of fiction is to distinguish itself from reality, yet it cannot exist without a set of codes and conventions. From the moment linguistic activity, in the broadest sense of the term, is triggered, it initiates a process of reference.
The artists in Fictionary play with these references. They reclaim the endless flow of images, from television to trendy magazines, from crime fiction to American cinema, from Grimm’s fairy tales to comic books, to offer us what could be called a spatialisation of narrative*. The viewer is invited to move around, within and through Fictionary, combining the pleasure of recognition with that of surprise.
In Episode 1, codes taken from low culture are twisted, manipulated, recycled, in the improbable and deceptively naïve machines of Laurent Terras, in Jim Lambie’s psychedelic reworkings of pop-rock culture, and in the parasitic and archipelagic wall-paintings of Bruno Peinado.
Episode 2 plunges us into a universe halfway between Perrault, Sade, Bataille and Magritte. A universe in which the artists play with the collective imaginary of myths, legends and tales. But these are cruel tales, like those of Ingrid Mourreau, where innocence is thwarted, perverted by Cyril Lepetit, and where characters undergo the ultimate torments of a calvary orchestrated by the artist in the work of Frédéric Clavère.
Episode 3 presents a series of small staged scenarios and trap-like setups in which the viewer’s expectations, shaped by conventions often borrowed from cinema, are constantly deflected and disrupted. From the Hitchcock-like murder scenes of Virginie Barré where clues multiply only to mislead us, to the scripted soundtracks of Anne de Sterk, from Philippe Charles’ chicken house that is too human to be honest, to Stéphanie Majoral’s bathroom constellation poised between daily life and Hollywood, the boundary between reality and fiction becomes opaque, often with unsettling results. Running through it all is the sartorial drift between simulacrum and haute couture performed by Denis Brun.
Fictionary is a social game, a game of appearances and conventions, sometimes cruel and sometimes humorous, where each artist becomes the director (the manipulator?) of a shared and everyday mythology.
Text by Sandra Patron in the exhibition catalogue
*This term is borrowed from Dominique Païni, Director of the Cinémathèque Française, in Art Press no. 255, March 2000.
