MAC VAL is putting on the first monographic museum show by the artistic duo Brognon Rollin (born, respectively, in 1978 and 1980, in Belgium and in Luxembourg), a mixture of new and older works.
Behind the exhibition title, taken from Borges, there is a simple, yet dizzying question: “Is reality soluble in its representation?” Does reality exist outside its representations? What role do time and perception play? And relativity? And its spatial dimension? How do we give form to the experience of duration? Or waiting? Of suspension? Of balance?
Brognon Rollin’s projects are densely intertwined narratives inscribed in the history of minimal and conceptual art. Combining symbols, events, objects and anecdotes that are in principle unconnected and sometimes fantastical, the works are powerfully polysemous supports for unfolding lines of flight imbued with melancholy and poetry. _ What we see is only the tip of the iceberg. A clock freezes when the viewer approaches it in the constrained space of a cell (8m2 Loneliness); a line sitter occupies the space of a museum until the voluntary departure of a person reaching the end or their life (Until Then); the duo makes an actual-size tracing of the island of Gorée and then store it, fragment by fragment, on a shelf (Cosmographia); in Jerusalem, on a football pitch whose geometry is deformed, children calculate the position of the centre circle (The Agreement).
Waiting, confinement, the status quo and fragility are at the heart of their obsessions, leading them to explore intermediary spaces: addictions, the sacred, prisons, islands, etc.
By shifting these pointers, by bringing into play a change of perspective, the artists postulate that a fall can resemble soaring, and vice versa. A theatre spotlight positioned over the exhibition reveals no show. Is resilience child’s play? Do statues have a life? Is there something new under the sun? What happens when my eyes are looking elsewhere?
Between Philip K. Dick, Stefan Zweig and Jorge Luis Borges, David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin explore the interstices of time. The works in the exhibition can be experienced like so many spatio-temporal fault lines and, in the end, encourage meditation on the programmed disappearance of all things.
Text by Julien Blanpied and Frank Lamy, curators of the exhibition.
