John Miller, Essayiste
Patrick Javault is welcoming John Miller.
Artist, critic, and musician John Miller was long associated with a series of sculptures and reliefs made of accumulated objects, dummies, and mirrors and uniformly coated in a brown unequivocally evoking feces. The «John Miller brown» served to depict the permanent recycling produced by art, the conversion of values, and libidinal cathexis, in a new realism feeding on Freudism and Marxism at a time of globalization. The fact that Miller later substituted gold for brown changes nothing to the fact. Since 1994 the artist has also been working on a series of photographs, «Middle of the Day series,» whose shared characteristic is that they were all taken between noon and 2pm. Starting from this rather general constraint, the series draws up a portrait of everyday life on the planet, intersecting with street photography as well as conceptual photography. Taking television game shows as the subjects of paintings, reinterpreting their sets to make installations, the artist questions the limitations of artistic strategies when it comes to producing a point of view on forms of entertainment. Emptiness and vacancy seemingly characterize the world of John Miller, who claims De Chirico’s metaphysical painting as one source of inspiration. Besides a new personal exhibition opening at the Praz Delavallade gallery on Sept. 8, John Miller is one of the artists selected by Julien Fronsacq for the exhibition «Dérives de l’Imaginaire» visible at the Palais de Tokyo starting on Sept. 28.
