Untitled Breast, 1990, a wax female breast positioned on the wall at eye level, welcomed visitors at the top of the stairway leading to the rooms of the new Jeu de Paume, the site of Robert Gober’s first solo exhibition in France. Though the moulage technique does render an effect of reality, it became quickly evident that this somewhat jaundiced object was not being played for its illusionistic qualities: the surface, painted ocher, was scarcely evocative of real flesh, and the color and texture of the material made one think more of a bar of soap, a suppository, or, of course, a candle.

Leg

Philippe Thomas presents us with an occasion to focus on an artist who plays hide-and-seek with his identity, dissembling behind Les readymade appartiennent à tout le monde (Readymades belong to everyone), a fictive international agency. Thomas looks for “characters” to cast in his art history: “The point is to seduce the art-lover or the art professional, so as to leave his name definitively associated with a work awaiting only him and his signature in order to become a reality.” Thomas thus proposes that the purchaser appropriate the work by signing in his stead.

Aware that the simulation of

This exhibition of Gérard Garouste’s new work consists of both paintings and sculpture, along with gouaches, engravings, and terra-cotta reliefs. The sculptures, unshown until now, reveal Garouste’s fondness for this form. It is striking, from the very first view of the large paintings and sculptures, to see the evanescent long-lined figures (to which Garouste had accustomed us in his earlier series of paintings on the Divine Comedy) dissolve even more in the present series, and then to see them taken out of their frames and materialized in three-dimensions. The oneiric forms—spectral silhouettes