Jimmy Robert
Centre régional d’art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée
In an essay first published in 2002, critic and curator Jörg Heiser noted certain Romantic tendencies in 1960s and ’70s Conceptual art. Among the key figures of this so-called Romantic Conceptualism was Bas Jan Ader, who came to stand for an artmaking whose stripped-down, barely there form belied a vested concern with bodily politics and the construction and representation of subjectivity. Similar qualities can be found in Jimmy Robert’s solo exhibition “Appui, tendu, renversé”—the title literally translates to “Support, Tense, Reversed” but, minus the commas, simply refers to a handstand—where