The glass case beloved of old-world museological practice has long since been reclaimed by artists as a strategic presentational device. When a project calls for that special kind of isolation, nothing else carries quite the same authority—even when the tone is ironic. For the latest entry in his “Pavilion Interface” series, Belgian artist Michel François performed—in private—inside an enormous glazed box installed in the center of the gallery. What remains of his action is a large block of multicolored Plasticine from which parts have been scooped out. The block sits on the floor in the middle of the box, while the excised portions have been sliced up and stuck around its walls. From a distance, the effect is of smears of paint; close-up, the substance of the slices becomes apparent.
If vitrine-based works by Damien Hirst—in particular, the likes of A Thousand Years, 1990—come to mind when looking at this work, what François has set out to do feels, in spite of its reported performative element, quieter and more concerned with materials and their creative transformation than do the Brit’s morbid tableaux. Plasticine is the first—and often only—“sculptural” material that most people handle and thus makes an effective metaphor for the creative process. The embodiment of malleability, the modeling clay also stands in for the playful imagining and retooling of meaning. François is an established champion of the ephemeral; here, in combining that transience with an allusion to permanence and preservation—however well worn in itself—he has produced something deceptively serious and entirely disarming.
