mdlx Collections - Carte blanche with Michel Delacroix

This exhibition could have been called "retour de chez-robert". About ten years ago, on the initiative of Sylvie Zavatta, director of the Frac, I exhibited in this same venue the chez-robert project, an experimental gallery where I organised more than
36 exhibitions. This was not a break in my work as an artist, but an extension of my reflection on the art world and its mechanisms.

In the course of this adventure, I met many artists whose work spoke to me. The exhibition constraints of chez-robert demanded a different approach, and the creation of unexpected forms. Some of the works, conceived specifically for this context, made me want to broaden the experience and build up a collection.

Of course, like many artists, I already owned a few works, acquired by exchange or donation. But this project was different from the previous one. It was born of a precise and well-thought-out intention: to bring together a body of work that would affirm my choices, and then eventually to share them.
The works that I have gradually acquired are discoveries made at exhibitions, art fairs, in galleries or during meetings with artists. I've made sure that these acquisitions are guided by the content of the work rather than by personal affinities. Some artists are close to me, others I have met from time to time, and some I have never met.

There are currently around forty works in the collection. The aim is not to accumulate, but rather to construct a judicious and singular vision of an artistic landscape in keeping with my intuitions and my biases. The works, which are generally modest in size and use a limited palette of colours, take the form of objects, drawings and mini-installations of apparent simplicity. They could be described as "neo-conceptual revisited". They play with established codes and are full of a subtle irony that questions the mechanisms for assigning value that govern the art world. This is not a lesson in aesthetics, but rather a disruption of the viewer's expectations, from an angle that is both amused and deeply reflective. This work adopts a critical stance through an often very simple visual vocabulary and elementary forms, which paradoxically reveal a stimulating conceptual complexity.

A paradox emerges in this body of work: on the one hand, irony and humour are omnipresent in many of the pieces; on the other, there is an ambition for legitimacy, to be part of a chapter in the history of art and to take the measure of the times. The humour of some of the works is not limited to a simple comic function; it combines lightness with seriousness. This humorous ambivalence underlines the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of contemporary art: to laugh at one's own seriousness. In reality, it means taking what may seem like trifles seriously and reinjecting value into them where they seemed to lack it.

The works in my collection and those I have chosen for dialogue in the Frac Franche-Comté collection have in common that they are simultaneously ambitious and delightful. They play on visual or verbal correspondences and open up a wider reflection on the very nature of art and its reception.