“Planet of Signs”

A nod to Roland Barthes’s seminal text Empire of Signs (1970), this group exhibition curated by Guillaume Désanges likewise references D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form. Just as the latter examined the recurrence of elementary forms throughout nature, so does “Planet of Signs” look at the widespread use of basic shapes in art and their capacity to convey knowledge and beliefs.

Gino de Dominicis’s Cubo invisibile, 1969, recasts the painted outline of a square on the floor as the base of an imaginary cube, referencing the spiritual powers and symbolism associated with these perfect geometric shapes. Meanwhile, the symbols adorning Suzanne Treister’s hand-drawn copies of letterheads from ministries and institutions evoke the sign’s authoritarian implications and its ability to transmit political and ideological concepts. Other pieces call to mind the knowledge system based on resemblance and natural affinities described in Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things (1966). Mike Kelley’s Endless Morphing Flow of Common Decorative Motifs (Jewelry Case), 2002, for instance, is a vitrine containing cheap brooches, pins, and pendants arranged in rows according to their similarities. Heart shapes become leaves and anchors turn into crosses, breaking down the dividing lines between one form and the next while suggesting that even lowly objects are governed by evolutionary principles. Raphaël Zarka’s slide show also explores the implications of likeness. Eighty color slides catalogue the inexplicable recurrence of the rhombicuboctahedron, a solid figure with twenty-six faces, whether in a lightbulb, a sundial, or the National Library building in Minsk. These testimonies to a mysterious history of forms underscore the divide between the sign’s relative simplicity and the richness of the knowledge to which it refers.