The Shortsighted, Visiting Festivals

Visiting festivals, biennials and triennials of contemporary art and photography, we pick images, we swell of life forms, forms that you instill the love of life or despair. I will not "be the critic", I will refer to these times when, in front of thousands of works, I am the shortsighted one which does not try to look at the captions and texts, except very rarely, but one who leaves soak in a sense that one form can give. I finally read the texts, heavy, tiring, probably useless, but not so systematically reducing, I leave these penguin instructions especially when they want to be revolutionary or at least whistleblowers and bad teaching.

At that time the shortsighted refuses to understand and even think when the form is too obviously linked to the word that it is not there forms but words. Too often it is no way, but sometimes it comes out, charmed by the touch or slap. Slap and caress are never true except when they don't leave you and move into your eyes for long.

Always at odds with the Curators Biennial, I have this year in Venice the impression of a fragmented collage, again and again, which each time build himself for my greatest joy. This rarely happens in other events. Collage of meaning, time, country, ways of hands-on. Doing by others why not ? But it is so fine when artists get their hands dirty. And indeed this is probably this presence which interests me in a work. Hand, body, eyes, feet and certainly not words well or poorly said, except when it is literature and only literature. Venice is the image of globalization in which contemporary art is the image. No never. Never even number of items could be tics as common features of our time. This collage as an sensible and perceptible all which takes us into a "world of forms" that everyone contructs —  and not a collection like the Pinault's one that was simultaneously a great noise in Punto de Dogana —. The difficulty is that personal collages are rarely shared, becoming so tight at the other. Visiting with friends and gathering to share becomes so difficult with words of each ones. This difficulty of sharing has always existed but not at this point, perhaps because form touchs intimate and respect of everyone. Learning forms passed by a meanings of referent and beliefs. It wasn't not "learn" like with the speech of the guide become poor mediator, but to "know". Why not learn to become the shortsighted removing his glasses. He apologized for not seeing everything to be sure he kept a blurry imag of memory.

If beauty is dropped, beauty is nevertheless the extreme elegance of some gestures and many works — pieces they say, like coins —. Humanity is inside this rich and diverse context of contemporary expression. And nothing seems to reduce the beauty. Provide names ? Some of them without thinking further forward, according to the festivals : in PhotoEspana the Japanese Kphei Yoshiyuki, and in Venice the Finnish / Danish / Swedish curators Elmgreen et Dragset with an upsetting staging, Pascale MarthineTayou with his bulimic accumulation, Moshekwa Langa with his worlds related to red sons. Tomas Seraceno with more sons but in space. Chu Yun with a dark micro-illuminated space, and to finish maybe Sarah Sze in Lyon with a giant machine. The "maybe" is because I could not even make a collage of her many lived works because the weight of the speech probably made me stay there only a few hours.

This is a quite happyness to concentrate himselves, sometimes sharing a founder or simply light feeling.