Europe

Étienne Chambaud

The Exchange (The Horse)

2010

Etienne Chambaud, The Exchange (The Horse), 2010. Installation.

In 2010, KADIST, David Roberts Foundation and Nomas Foundation successively presented an exhibition of the work of Étienne Chambaud in collaboration with Vincent Normand: The Siren’s Stage/Le Stade des Sirènes. For this project, Etienne Chambaud made The Exchange (The Horse). A contract was written with the lawyer Daniel McClean to establish the conditions for the exhibition and conservation of copies of the sculptures exchanged between the collections of these three foundations. The copies become the new originals that can never be exhibited and must remain preserved in sealed crates. The contract, as well as other documents such as the proof of authenticity or the bailiff’s declaration regarding the sealing of the crates, constitute the only visible part of the work as evidence of its existence, while also defining its absence.

Étienne Chambaud's artistic approach is nourished by his practice as a reader and the notion of intertextuality. It calls into question the modernist postulate of a work which is sufficient in itself by insisting on its historical and semantic inscription in a larger creative scheme. It is no longer a simple object made available to the spectator's gaze, but the result of everything that preceded it. It never functions in isolation but finds its meaning or its interest in a permanent dialogue with other works. They thus enrich each other to gradually draw the vague contours of a constellation of common references. They function like palimpsests which keep the trace of a previous work while proposing a new composition, thus oscillating endlessly between an inevitable repetition and a horizon each time renewed.

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Étienne Chambaud The Exchange (The Horse)

Étienne Chambaud

The Exchange (The Horse)