News January 2021

Gianni Pettena, invited within the cycle “Matters of Concern/Matières à penser”, for his first exhibition in Belgium, proposes a project in two parts. 

At La Verrière a selection of objects, models, photos, drawings. documents, videos, installations shows in all evidence the generous and hybrid activity of the artist and this allows to understand his far-reaching attitude, at the same time idealistic and playful, open also to humour and subversion, as well as to a rigorous analytical thinking..

Just a few meters from La Verrière a big installation is built in the space of the ISELP (Institut Supérieur pour l'Étude du Langage Plastique).  

This work, Paper/Midwestern Ocean, fills the exhibition space with white paper stripes which must be cut with scissors to create paths and find one’s space.  

First conceived in 1971 as a collective experiment for a lecture at an American university, this ‘penetrable’ installation proposes an overturning of the architectural experience because it makes invisible the inside of the building before getting it back by means of an anonimous use, independent from the ideas of others.

(Guillame Désanges)

The title of the exhibition "L’usage des richesses" (The Use of Wealth), comes from Georges Bataille, whose ideas on this topic are illustrated by Dominique Mathieu in the essay presenting the exhibition.  So, if it cannot be denied “the fact that the commercial value of the artwork remains, from a capitalistic point of view, higher than its value in use”,  Bataille says that “the sun gives without ever receiving” and that art is “The Gift”. Then, once that the basic needs of survival and production have been met, this allows us to assume and spend surplus energy "for nothing".  All  the works on show prove that “tribute must be paid to the unproductive expenditure of art and the “loss-making pleasure” that accompanies it.  Therefore, for art, it can be said that it’s “the crazy energy that sometimes leads us to experience things that are “pointless”, that it can be “an endeavour to pay tribute to the omnipotence of Nature, which our civilisation has the almost structural desire to constantly oppose”, that ” It is a key that opens the doors of excessiveness, ushering in new perspectives that have no productive goals but are open to every possible outcome.”

Artists: Béatrice Balcou, Patrick Bouchain, Ícaro Lira, Dominique Mathieu, Marianne Mispelaëre, Gianni Pettena, The Play, Matthieu Saladin, Endre Tót, les gens d’Uterpan, Lois Weinberger, Zapatistes.