↳ Exhibitions

Antoine Donzeaud at Museum of Art and Archeology of Périgueux, Vesunna Museum and Chapel of the Visitation

August 21, 2018

Artist: Antoine Donzeaud

Exhibition title: Une décision purement pratique

Venues: Museum of Art and Archeology of Périgueux, Vesunna Museum, Chapel of the Visitation, Périgueux, France

Date: July 6 – September 17, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist

Articulately distributed between three institutions (Museum of Art and Archeology of Périgueux, Vesunna Museum and the Chapel of the Visitation) Antoine Donzeaud’s exhibition can be read as an accumulation of his obsessions: architectural derivatives, spatial cut-ups, sentimental blockchains, digital meta-urbanism. The title of the exhibition is taken from an interview with artist Gordon Matta Clark, an artist celebrated as an «anarchitect» for his practice of cutting into buildings. We could also affiliate this exhibition to another building, the Slow House by Diller Scofidio. An unrealized project, the house remains a prodigious illustration of architecture as a spectrum of information.

Each institution adheres to a scenario, a fiction appropriated by architecture and collectively performed by its occupants. Being so, the practice of Antoine Donzeaud is like a gradual metastasis, a virus spreading through the veins of the spaces it inhabits. His first intervention at the MAAP is twofold: extraction and re-contextualization. The plastic bubble formerly used as shelter for the receptionist is decontextualized from its administrative function. The carpeted floor continues its design through the curves of the said plexiglas bubble. An interest in structure, lines of rupture and boundaries is also at the heart of his work. The boundaries separating the exhibition spaces from the ancient frescoes are thus blurred, connected, assembled by metres of plastic sheeting stretched on frames. This ceiling façade breaks the vocabulary, a separation which dictates the forms and eras and hybridizes with the building, while suggesting new potentialities. Sampling, travel and reconfiguration are procedures also incorporated in Antoine Donzeaud’s series of new videos. Intimate fragments from scattered scenes of Instagram stories are exposed like so many commodities of the contemporary industry of influences.

At the Visitation site, several walls have been removed, clear cuts are made on the walls allowing for the reemergence of the Chapels details. The nave, the altar and the original main door filter through into the exhibition space. That which exists outside of the frame, the fluctuating history of places and their functions are celebrated here and restored to the state of strata. Adopted into the exhibition, they are repurposed for new artistic intentions, including the latex jackets of the artist Bianca Bondi. The last intervention takes place at the Vesunna Museum, where an escape game (a game of enigmas consisting in escaping from a closed place) has been dismantled and reused in an intermittent way at the Visitation site. Through reenactment the architectural bones serve as a basis for a new narrative. In the center of the platform stands a disjointed house, restored to its simplest form of syntax. It serves as a reference point to the demountable houses of Jean Prouvé, the post-war architect famous for his adaptive and functional modules. Here, industrial windows overlook ornaments and collages of YouTube video excerpts.

«When you cut into the present the future leaks out,» said the American writer William Burroughs. Iit is perhaps within this unstable timeless territory that the exhibition exists.

-Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou

Antoine Donzeaud (b. 1985) lives and works in Paris, France. As a multidisciplinary artist, his practice explores both social and physical structures in contemporary society with regards to architecture and space, identity and community.