The strange objects assembled by the exhibition “L’empreinte” (the imprint, imprinting) compelled me to think creatively, so I silently thanked organizer Georges Didi-Huberman and cocurator Didier Semin for the occasion. But “L’empreinte” often failed to coordinate the materials on view with the concepts elaborated in the accompanying catalogue. From room to room (with nearly 300 items), I thought repeatedly, Why include this object?

Much more coherent than the exhibition is Didi-Huberman’s catalogue essay. It attaches theory to his twentieth-century oddities and provides some history as well to

Many had assumed that the French artist Ernest T. had disappeared as surely as the ’80s, a decade for which he seemed almost an official critical representative. This artist, who has used various aliases to signal multiple ironic, elusive personas, first deployed the lapidary pseudonym “Ernest T.” in an advertisement he placed in Flash Art in December 1983. He later created a series of canvases that he signed with the letter T, repeating it in the form of an abstract motif in primary colors. His purpose, seemingly, was to mark the end of the avant-garde during a time of flourishing commercialism,