The Tables of Time
2 Jun – 11 Sep 2017
"Venturing into the invisible arcane mysteries of time, in the age of double men, I asked myself what was still there to see when a mirror is watching itself through the looking-glass and when we don’t need a reflection to speak on our own. When the absence of flesh returns to the lubricating image showing a pornographic production of the diminished reality and when fear goes viral, it is a matter of reappropriating a split life, death and the rest, of taking the grounds to pieces. In order to reconcile what’s separated, I had to seize what scares, give up my certitudes and, inevitably, expose myself to fragments of a reality situated in the relic of times.
Apart, the question was not to reproduce the real but to reinterpret it to go beyond. With the singularity of irony, I teased bodies’ roughness and sensuality up to their foundations, their derealization, in full sun. Destroy and save from destruction. The Beast stands here, at the end of the trickery. A promise as a threat. To decipher it, a Braille book is needed.
By combining realistic objects, taken out from the imaginary of my everyday life, a quasi-mnemonic dimension is reached. This combination acts like an answer to the ghosts from Beyond. I dive, in order to better smuggle myself in. Unseen, unknown. Then an unplanned coherence is brought to light. It is necessary to take risks to remain faithful. The man of the future will be the one who has a long memory. Most certainly, to name is already to create."
Gérard Berréby
Apart, the question was not to reproduce the real but to reinterpret it to go beyond. With the singularity of irony, I teased bodies’ roughness and sensuality up to their foundations, their derealization, in full sun. Destroy and save from destruction. The Beast stands here, at the end of the trickery. A promise as a threat. To decipher it, a Braille book is needed.
By combining realistic objects, taken out from the imaginary of my everyday life, a quasi-mnemonic dimension is reached. This combination acts like an answer to the ghosts from Beyond. I dive, in order to better smuggle myself in. Unseen, unknown. Then an unplanned coherence is brought to light. It is necessary to take risks to remain faithful. The man of the future will be the one who has a long memory. Most certainly, to name is already to create."
Gérard Berréby
The French publisher Gérard Berréby (Allia editions) is also a plastic artist, whose Tables of time attempt to show the part unsayable of the human condition. When two mirrors speak to each other, what do they say? When two vanitas look at each other or when the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci is reduced to the skeletal state, what happens? Created between 2012 and 2015, these singular confrontations form an intricate, equivocal and disconcerting art installation...
Curator: Martin Oliva
Curator: Martin Oliva
Born in 1950, Gérard Berréby lives in Paris. In 1982, he created Allia, a publishing house currently featuring more than 750 books in its catalog. He has written two collections of poetry, Stations des profondeurs (2010) and Joker et mat (2016). Since 2011, he is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly Feuilleton. In 2012, at the theater of Gennevilliers, his video piece titled La Colle ne fait pas le collage was presented as a performance. In 2015, he exhibited The Tables of Time at the International Center of Poetry in Marseille.
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