Pierre-Yves Le Duc

Maja Arte Contemporanea is delighted to present French artist Pierre-Yves Le Duc’s first solo exhibit in Rome.

His artistic quest is mainly based on creating site-specific monumental installations consisting of cycles of complex and well-organized works with a strong focus on project.

The oeuvre displayed here consists of twelve works selected from the GU series, four included in the Cosmic Whore series, and a set of three canvases titled Bandiera.

Exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples in 2004, the GU installation (acronym for ‘Human Genome’ as well as for ‘Il Giudizio Universale’ – ‘The Last Judgement’) is a monumental light box composed of one hundred drawings (ink on paper, ‘technique de la réserve’) in which anthropomorphic symbols become more and more numerous as the viewer moves away from the center. The pictorial signs – hominids of pure light – multiply themselves and cause black matter to disappear from the supporting frame. This continues until they become hypothetically as innumerable as to annul their individuality, allowing the initial and illusive white sheet to reappear. This centrifugal vision is opposed to a centripetal one: the entity depicted rarefies until every form of life becomes extinct once and for all, and black matter prevails. No specific reading interpretation is provided. Rather, this work is an enquiry into the vulnerability of human condition.

The title Handle with care does not refer exclusively to man, whose survival depends so dramatically on issues that are not only environmental, demographic, political and social. In this exhibition Le Duc covers a second delicate topic – that of sexuality – and exposes seven paintings whose transfigured images open up to intentionally ambivalent multiple readings. The white canvases (acrylic on cotton canvas and linen veil) have been designed as being so pure as to suggest that anything close to them may corrupt them. Technically, they derive from a process of incessant elimination and rarefaction, and in this sense they are ambiguous because they refuse the artistic medium of painting by causing whatever is part of it to disappear. The theme is placed in a context of absolute purity and is alien to minimalism. More aptly, it is the child of an emotional directness which is void of frills, puritanical scribbles, and literary simpering – and which never, ever seeks easy provocations.