Hugues Reip
Hugues Reip’s art (his name rhymes with Irma Vep) suggests fictional heroes, light and acrobatic Fantômas that turn the practice of escape into an artistic sport. The invitation to his new exhibition L’Évasion* at the Crédac is a childhood card, featuring a black-and-white photo of a ten-year-old boy on skis.
His works, installations, films and drawings constitute fantastical “mini worlds” that neither create nor impose a cohesive or immersive environment. Like Eyeland (the clump of soil planted with artificial flowers), Reip’s works by no means express solitariness. The Black Sheeps – small dustballs peppered with paper butterflies and mushrooms, each of which spins just above the floor – form a scattered flock offering a humorous, ornate interpretation of Duchamp’s Dust Breeding.
Reip is an image-maker, an artisan of conspicuously modest machines and tricks. In their economy of means, his works distil an efficient tough modest enchantment; this economy is the stuff of dandyism, an elegance of little. His very first portable sculptures make up a domestic exhibition on a Formica table. His art is more evocative of The Magic Roundabout. It turns its back on the machinery that absorbs the viewer and hinders projection—this is what Barthes reproached cinema with.
Reip’s art is an art of projection, assuming a variety of forms: film, diorama, collage-drawings and scenery, the latter sometimes reduced to a single object like a boulder (L’Orque). Reip explores a psychotropic, dreamlike imagination, a world of otherwise familiar images. For example in his collage-drawings, without identifying them, one detects elements of symbolism, surrealism and Japonism. One also sees some Odilon Redon, some Max Ernst, some Öyvind Fahlström, some scientific illustration and some ukiyo-e. His works converse with living artists (François Curlet, Rodolphe Burger) or dead artists (William S. Burroughs, Oskar Fischinger, Öyvind Fahlström), to whom he sometimes pays tribute. He created a little diorama inspired by a dream of Joseph Cornell (Dreaming out of Windows – after Joseph Cornell’s Dreams, 18 December 1965). Yet it is not a referential art; Reip simply shows that he sees through the art of his predecessors. Every projection is retroprojection. This also seems to be what is signified the eye in Eyeland, which observes the brutally illuminated floral apparition.
Hugues Reip will therefore give us a chance to discover a few of the artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers who accompany him in his work.
