Artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
(born 1968) is an artist of
vigilance. Since the mid-1990s
he has been working to reveal
the invisible structures informing
our relation to a real that is
always already mediatised.
He tirelessly probes the
production of the image,
considered in its political space.
Visibility/invisibility,
luminosity/darkness, memory/
forgetting, what we know/
what we think we know,
evoking without showing,
saying without relating –
these are some of the markers
for grasping these works
which give formal expression
to the codes that organise
the flux of images. Whereas
the works of the 1990s reached
towards a kind of practical
and paranoiac guide to the
world (how to demonstrate
in public space while avoiding
the eyes of cameras, how to
camouflage oneself at home, etc.)
and very explicitly deconstructed
the society of hyper-control,
today Auguste-Dormeuil
is continuing his probing in a
more poetic and metaphorical
vein, with greater distance
and purview.
The exhibition ‘INCLUDE ME
OUT,’ the artist’s first solo show
in a French museum, is built
around a simple but nevertheless
essential question: does Time
traverse us, or do we traverse
Time? If Time can be calculated,
it is by essence unwatchable. How
can we translate this experience
of the elasticity of Time?
The exhibition, which is being
continued at the Fondation
d’Entreprise Ricard in December,
unfolds like an initiatory
sequence bringing together
recent productions and key
works. From the entrance
inwards, When the paper… (2013)
invites visitors to abandon their
certainties and enter a zone of
doubt: the territory of art. From
darkness to light, back and forth,
it will be a matter of blindness.
What do we see? How do we see?
How should we show what
cannot be represented? The works
are distributed along this territory
of suspense like so many tools of
analysis. They are visual supports
for analysing and questioning our
relation to the real. Paradoxically,
the images made by Renaud
Auguste-Dormeuil are images
of the absence of images, frozen
images. Grounded in historical
facts, in urban legends, the works
are triggers and springboards
for narratives.
Questioned about the
paradoxically worded title
‘INCLUDE ME OUT,’ Auguste-
Dormeuil explains as follows: ‘in Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard, when the producer invites Fritz Lang to come and have a drink, he laconically replies “Include me out.” With insolent elegance, Godard recaptures all the paradoxical complexity of Lang’s position. Beyond that, this “include me out” is for me a strong way of expressing a simple idea that we all experience: it is not because I live in a society that I subscribe to its ideas, and it is not because I watch television that I subscribe to it, and so on for so many other things.’
Frank Lamy