Jean-Luc Moulène: le point le puits le plein et la pluie

For more than twenty years, Jean-Luc Moulène has developed a complex body of work, both analytical and mysterious, of which photography has long constituted the most visible and best-known part. From the Disjunctions—a series of seemingly banal, frequently urban images that function as indeterminate topographical references at the heart of the real world—to the celebrated Objets de grève (‘Strike objects’: product shots of industrial artefacts made by striking workers, subverting the tools of their trade), Moulène’s photographs are strikingly raw, cruel and uncompromising, but always secretly metaphorical.

Drawings and sculptural objects have always played a part in his work, but both have assumed greater importance in recent years, superseding photography to become the chief component of Moulène’s most recent, large-scale exhibitions, though the essential spirit driving his distinctive oeuvre remains unchanged. Moulène’s works explore the question of representation in his chosen media, while at the same time drawing on their essential physicality and materiality to engage tirelessly with political, social and ontological issues ‘made flesh’—notably through the concept of ‘transaction’, an economically and sensitively charged term applied to the ongoing transaction between the imagination and reality.