Nicolas Floc'h

Born in 1970 in Rennes (FR)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)

  

Frac Lorraine portable

2000
Dimensions variable
Purchased in: 1999

Since the mid-1990s, Nicolas Floc’h has been questioning ways of producing artworks, playing with the porousness of the boundaries between artistic and industrial spheres, and stressing the inclusion of art in systems of economic logic.

The Productive Writings convey this approach based on infiltration and appropriation: produced in 1997 as part of the Urban Actions (Metz, Frac Lorraine), the writing of the word ‘Cabbage’ was formed by the vegetable itself. After reaching maturity, the cabbage was then reinjected into the economic (sold at market as an ‘Art-Product’) and social (in the form of a soup) circuit.

This adaptation to market rules and its dictates is extended in the series of Portable Art Structures. Corresponding to the current requirements of efficiency, mobility and adaptability, pieces of portable furniture are produced with industrial materials and a neutral colour range. Designed in a practical vein, they are folded and stacked in a box, which can be transported in an ordinary car. Paradoxically, these pieces of furniture, which can potentially be reproduced on a large scale, are one-off items produced on the basis of a commission or order made by a person, and the nature of his activities and his specific needs.

The Frac Lorraine Portable, made in 1999, offered an effective and ironical answer to the situation of the institution. Effective, because the itinerant state is written into the Frac’s brief (distribution, circulation of the collection within the region) and ironical because it tallied with the institutional situation of ‘forced’ nomadism, the institution at that time being without any exhibition area.

This easy-to-handle, adaptable and light ‘kit’ Frac offers a tangible translation of the rituals linked with the exhibition: from the transport of works and the opening ceremony to the reception of the public, and providing people with information.

^{Hélène Guenin}

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