(…) The subtitle of this Panorama 16, « Solus Locus » does more than just invert the title of Raymond Roussel’s famous book, Locus Solus (1914) (…) This paradoxical discrepancy is something to be articulated and constructed, as when, “away from the bustle of Paris,” the inventor Martial Canterel revealed his fascinating contraptions to his guests, those changeable and ingenious visual questions shown on-site in what very much looked an exhibition without deliberately taking the name of one. These magnetic marvels will be displayed in Le Fresnoy, hearing the words spoken by the artists themselves in their discourse and in their working notes: mythologies, alterations, metamorphoses, falls, brain waves, shamanism, the golden section, hallucinations, morphing, fetishes, ghostly presences, the big bang and other utopian territories. (…) A contemporary “Solus Locus” that is not a negation of the world, but an oblique look into its lines of tension and disappearance, making it incredibly complex, desirable, unstable (politically, socially and spiritually) – a place of perpetual becoming.
Matthieu Orléan – Curator