The candle burning in Marine Hugonnier’s exhibition in Vienna was first lit in the year 2000, at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. At that time the point was the fragrance it released: that of a candle that has just been extinguished. Hugonnier had used a similarly paradoxical tautology in an earlier work: Flowers, 1996-2000, a bouquet in a vase standing on a pedestal. The flowers’ yellows and whites were especially strong because the artist had treated them with paint. This kind of pictorial manipulation, occurring as it does not on canvas but on the object itself, adopts the philological