Sunday, October 5, 2008

FRAC Bourgogne



For his first solo show in France, Stefan Brüggemann (born in 1975 in Mexico City) has brought together a selection of works which subversively upset the rules of the art game, in particular, here, those governing representation and its content.

Stefan Brüggemann’s proposition is as paradoxical as it is provocative, in the way he plays with artistic codes, the better to reduce them to nothing. Art history tumbles into oblivion in favour of the surface of images. For example, he uses typography, but in order to deny the artistical reference thereto, typography also making reference to communication methods. The nihilist posture comes across in an often seductive way, ensnaring the spectator in his/her own art culture.He describes his praxis as TWISTED CONCEPTUAL POP, an association that is nothing if not paradoxical. 
The exhibition is constructed in three areas. A small entrance room is painted all in black, with, on the floor, a pile of posters with white wording printed on a similarly black ground—references to minimal sculpture and political art which Stefan Brüggemann one more activates the better to underscore the uselessness of all political ambition in art, along with all content-related dimensions. 

Two rooms echo each other on either side. Five reversed mirrors, facing the wall, are shown in one room, and five sentences made with black adhesive lettering are written on the walls of the other room. The sentences are very representative of what he has been developing since the mid-1990s : to deny today’s norm of the "all-communicational", where everyone is summoned to explain, comment, and elucidate, until the cows come home. Stefan Brüggemann sets up a language of refusal, often negative postulates affirming void, absence and impossibility. The texts he has chosen here are provocative in what they proclaim.

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