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| Gérard Collin Thiébaut, at the Musée du Louvre |
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Gérard Collin-Thiébaut created his first two Transcriptions in 1972, based on Picasso’s Femme au chapeau (1935) and Matisse’s paper cut-out Icare (1943). The artist transcribes the works of the two great masters of modern painting, reproducing them in the form of a puzzle. “Like every painter, I engage in regular daily painting sessions in my studio,” explains Collin Thiébaut. “Except that the traditional painter’s toolkit and raw materials are replaced by a puzzle bought in a shop.” In an ironic comment on his own status as a contemporary artist, and his inevitable, resolutely conceptual approach, Collin-Thiébaut replaces the practice of painting with the symbolic piecing together of copies of “masterpieces” from the history of art : the minutely detailed, identical recomposition of their commercial reproductions. Hence while Picasso’s Femme au chapeau (60 × 50 cm) is an original, unique, untouchable work preserved in a museum like a monument to a painterly tradition forever consigned to the past, its Transcription in a reduced format (14.8 × 10.4 cm) is both an industrial product of no inherent artistic value, and the result of a genuinely artistic process, “made by the hand of man”. As part of La Force de l’Art 02, Gérard Collin-Thiébaut presents five Transcriptions created between 1989 and 2008 by the artist himself, or “his studio”, in the galleries of the Louvre, alongside the original works by Eugène Delacroix, Veronese, Georges de la Tour, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Gérard Collin-Thiébaut Gérard Collin-Thiébaut’s work seeks to highlight the uselessness of doing. With his multiple pile-ops of meaningless objects and images from films or magazines to his copies, word for word, from complete literary and masterpieces or puzzles representing Master paintings, the artists questions the status of the art work and come up by appropriating certain museum exhibition practices, seeks to be aware of the processes of conservation, presentation and communication of current art. Exhibited in numerous French and foreign museums, the work of Gérard Collin-Thiébaut has also given rise to several initiatives in public spaces such as when his image notebooks were put on sale via a parking ticket machine. [V. Th.] Gérard Collin-Thiébaut was born in 1946 in Liepvre. |
