Eddy Merckx is pleased to announce the sixth appointment with the project GRID, to be held in Lisbon as part of CURA.'s take over of Kunsthalle Lissabon summer programme curated. GRID was created to investigate the many elements underpinning the choices and passions of the actors involved in books made by artists and made around art. For every appointment, an exhibition of books capable of recounting the encounters, loves and experiences, will be organized on the limited space of a library shelf, as a minimum unit of a complex structure. The library, conceived also as a cultural and experiential grid, will then host a guest in one of its spaces who will be responsible for addressing the contents, drawing on its collection of books, objects or works of art related to books. The guest curator of this sixth meeting of GRID is Christophe Daviet-Thery, a bookseller and publisher in Paris since 2001. He describes the show he will present as follows: Numerous artists have been so fascinated by colour, or have reflected so profoundly on it, that their names have become associated with certain ones, such as Yves Klein with blue, and Ad Reinhardt with black. Colour is a central element of the history of art, and such an essential component of many artists’ work that movements have been characterised by them: Der Blau Reiter, Fauvisme... And yet colour, which by definition is visual, is absent here, or virtually so. It is not a question of being interested in its retinal nature, its function or the symbolism underlying it, but rather in its representation via a conceptual approach. Roland Barthes wrote, “When I buy colours, it is by the mere sight of their name.” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, 2010) We name it in order to represent it. From May until August 2019, CURA. has been invited to take over the Kunsthalle Lissabon: its spaces, the exhibition programme as well as its entrance plaque will all be involved in an identity exchange and appropriation project. On this occasion, CURA. presents the continuation of its ongoing programme at BASEMENT ROMA with a project on doubling as well as otherness. The GRID project is curated by Eddy Merckx, providing a working platform based on collaboration between the figure of the critic and that of the collector. Eddy Merckx wants it to be an experimental workshop on the unexpressed potential of the figure of the collector in today’s art world, accompanied by the problematizing vision of the art critic, in an original curatorial partnership. On the occasion of GRID #6, Eddy Merckx will publish a fanzine. Christophe Daviet-Thery (www.daviet-thery.fr): “Being a bookseller means choosing and recommending. it means asserting one’s subjectivity, whilst excluding an exhaustive approach. Being a publisher means conceiving the most accurate and meaningful form. Being a curator means confronting, rethinking content as form. Three professions that share books and bookshelves. If we are to consider art as an everyday experience, we are prompted to question the notion of appropriation, which the book, as a medium, enables. When it isn’t a collector’s item, a book is a familiar object, one which is identifiable and of everyday use, and whose economical format makes it readily available to a wider audience and in a certain way democratic. To purchase a book is a cultural and political act. A book is a nomadic object, one that can be slipped in a pocket, taken along everywhere, like professor Kein in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé who always had a book. One by one, they come together to shape a library, a space for all possibilities and encounters, of which Jorge Luis Borges said: ‘I’ve always imagined paradise to be a kind of library.’ A library arises from juxtaposition, not accumulation. The book is apprehended in a transversal manner, by comparing it to various media, the interest in its use arising on the basis of the context in which it appears. These intersections give the bookseller’s profession a broader definition, ranging from that of a curator of projects such as vis-à-vis or je déballe ma bibliothèque, to that of an editor when a book needs to be thought of as an exhibition space as it was for Allan Kaprow. Posters. With this constant redefining of the profession comes the notion of complementarity, because like the library, projects come about as additions symbolized by the &.” Photo: Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #13, 1978 Collection MoMA, New York
