Jean-Luc Moulène

The Centre Pompidou is giving a monographic exhibition to the French artist Jean-Luc Moulène.

Invited to design his own retrospective, Moulène has chosen to present a “retrospective of protocols”, a programme of production for some thirty new pieces, a manifesto for his artistic investigations. The artist is known chiefly for his work with photography, but his more recent work on objects is of fundamental importance. The use of technologies drawn from industrial design combined with a meticulous approach to materials leads to the creation of works whose precision and “rightness” are crucial to them. Basing his thinking on mathematics, and on set theory in particular, the artist explores ideas such as intersection, laterality and section in a tension between body and object. His works metaphorically interrogate shared space, the form it takes, and its interaction with personal space. Here, objects “dialogue” less with the viewer than with other objects. The vast exhibition space might perhaps be compared to an urban environment, with its buildings and cars, its bodies making their way about, bodies that have to find their place in the chaos of individual desires, social conventions and political constraints. The exhibition is a poetic act that unites art, science and technology.