For L.F.D.A. 02.

There are a number of interpretations, but none – of course – is satisfactory : neither the evocation of the stage of a small, rustic theatre awaiting the arrival of its actors, nor the improbable scenography of works (mostly from the collections of France’s Fonds national d’art contemporain) intended as a critique of traditional museum hangings or the intimidating contemplation of greatness which they invite. No, this is something else entirely ; Le miracle familier, Xavier Boussiron and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux’s unquantifiable piece for La Force de l’Art 02 defies the logic of formal analysis. We are in the presence of a manifesto, or rather one of its variations, exhibited by its creators since 2005 – the manifesto of the “Sorrowful Passion”.

It all began with a song, Mister Pégase, about a music-hall artist of the French Belle Epoque, celebrated for his farting skills. Spinoza was waiting in the wings. Two almost simultaneous episodes followed : Les Choses à leur place (“Everything in its place”), an initial staged presentation of works with apparently unnatural affinities, and Les Géants de l’Angoisse (“The Giants of Terror”), an evening of ham-fisted “music hall” at the Spanish Cultural and Recreational Centre in Bayonne. Then a free book, Le Coeur du Mystère (“The heart of the mystery”), a hermetic, impenetrable pot-pourri of images and texts acting upon the reader like psychic stimuli.

The elements taken on board for Le miracle familier appear once again like essential antidotes to aesthetic certainties and categorisations : on the one hand, an assortment of striking works, boldly mixed ; on the other, the ostracised “Boronali”.* The donkey artist holds Sunset over the Adriatic, his one and only masterpiece (but what a masterpiece!), the perplexed spectator of the others’ renewed presence.
[M.A.]

*The Sunset was shown at the 1910 Paris Salon des Indépendants, apparently by Genoese painter Joachim Raphaël Boronali, accompanied by a manifesto for a new artistic movement – Excessivism. It attracted considerable critical interest until the newspaper Le Matin revealed it as the work of a donkey (using a paintbrush tied to his tail), belonging to Frédéric Gérard, the owner of the celebrated Montmartre cabaret and artists’ haunt Au Lapin Agile. The donkey’s real name was Lolo : “Boronali” is a translation into French backslang of “Aliboron”, the name of a donkey featuring in the famous Fables by Jean de la Fontaine.

X. Boussiron & A. Labelle-Rojoux

From the performance of writing fiction and art essays, of artistic work to the organization of events, multidisciplinary artist Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux expresses himself through a rough language often coloured with vulgarity, but for the purpose of "undermining" established upper middle-class certitudes and again questioning the place of art in our society. For his part, Xavier Bouissiron, a trained visual artist, brings about a work that navigates between performance, show and its musical creation. Their common interest for experimental and undisciplined art forms has already inspired several collaborations. [M. A.].

Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux was born in 1950 in Paris.
Xavier Boussiron was born in 1969.
They live and work in Paris

Les choses à leur place - 2005
Mise en scène de Xavier Boussiron et Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Bayonne