EN

En Route, on view at the Marfa Book Company May 8th through June 7, 2015, is a group exhibition featuring work by four European artists: Claire Decet, Samuel François, Benoit Platéus and Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. The works on view were made during the previous nine weeks while the artists, traveling together, enacted a self-directed artists residency in Los Angeles, en route, as it were, to Marfa. In this way, En Route formalizes the process of transit; encourages the consideration of temporality and movement in the works of each artist, whether painting, sculpture or collage; and provides a conclusion to their trip, if not their travel.

To be in one place, while being en route to another imbues us with a sense of immediacy that heightens our awareness of the present and may result in new, unforeseeable and, we gamble, memorable insight or accomplishment upon arrival. In such a context, we see ourselves looking back from the future, as it were, considering the present with a different knowledge. It should be added that ambivalence, approval and disapproval are all possible in that glance backward, since we cannot say for certain whether our awareness will pay off. This is the quality of risk that imbues time and place based experiments. It's a risk that, despite the darker aspects of its potential, has the benefit of being consonant with the experience of travel. For this and other reasons, experiments of this sort are difficult to sustain, at least without intermittent periods of inactivity or inebriation. But, as En Route suggests, they might be possible with the addition of multiple participants. This might also, in some instances, improve the chances of individual successes, or may at least diminish the discomfort in the sense of self-awareness that accompanies being en route to a conclusion of one sort or another. This is the spirit of the present exhibition: an openness to novelty, and its attendant risks, combined with the opportunity to share in the gamble. As a consequence, we have a body of work made, if not collaboratively, then together. The works of the artists in En Route also benefit from being dissimilar, however, and the artists have used the experience primarily to further their individual interests and concerns. Individually, the works raise medium-specific questions concerning temporality and movement that, taken together in this context, can be extrapolated to larger considerations of these concepts more generally.

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Claire Decet's work begins the walks she takes in the area around the rural home where she lives. Observations she makes on these walks often enter her work, which frequently incorporates the passage of time as one of its constituent, although sometimes only very faintly legible, elements. For a decade, for instance, she made paintings of a nearby nuclear power facility. Although the position of the viewer changes from year to year, not much else does, except the clouds. She has also made a sequence of paintings depicting flower arrangements in which the only distinguishing elements are the colors of the lightbulbs in a lamp that illuminates them. She has also exhibited a series of palettes and many uncommon flower arrangements in which the flowers are usually placed in bespoke, but largely unassuming and sometimes decidedly primitive vases. In each instance, time is considered as a scale determined by each object, and the presence of multiple objects both illustrates and confounds that scale. The cut flowers' time is limited, although they retain their beauty long after they've wilted and no longer draw water from the curious vases that will outlast them. The clouds that hover over the nuclear facility and the smoke from its chimneys contrast strikingly with the half life of the radiation being generated, although they also seem, by this scale, more similar to the residential buildings that can sometimes be seen in the paintings and which we might otherwise consider long-lasting. For this exhibition, she has transported her walks to a new location and produced work inspired by careful viewing of the fish tanks located near the apartment she rented in Los Angeles.

Texts — Tim Johnson