Maxime Le Bon
Odds & Ends
Project Info
- đ Rue du Chapeau 10
- đ Gevaert Edition
- đ€ Maxime Le Bon
- đ Piero Bisello
- đ Fabrice Schneider
Share on
Advertisement
The drawings by Maxime Le Bon grouped together for his exhibition Odds & Ends at
Rue Du Chapeau 10 make me think of a Japanese corporationâits inner workings, to
be precise. The drawings arenât in any way about a Japanese corporation. Rather,
their apparent chaos-turned-coherent speaks to me about deeply structured things
that we canât structure from without, like a Japanese corporation; in the shoes of a
Toyota worker, I'd be very familiar with the institutionâs law and order, things alien to
me if those shoes were off. Another point is whether I should care about someone
elseâs procedures.
My attempted answer is that people end up drawn to things that are dramatically
odd, like Odds & Ends. Pen marks shaping an abstracted flower bunch on a
yellowed paper exist near a cutout page with ink gestures in its margins, and a
skeleton. A jigsawed house mingles with a comma. Carnivalesque faces on the wall,
skewed and textured, tie the room together. This is what Le Bon gives us, and I am
sold. Someone, the artist, gave a fair amount of thought in first making and then
joining these thingsâmust not there be a reason, a rationale, an agenda? Le Bonâs
selection of drawings invites you to seek meaning; the pictures and figures are
minimally given to you, stripped, like signsâthings that must signify when put
together. Soaking them in, I feel close to those who uprooted ancient hieroglyphs, a
language nobody had read for 3000 years.
However, I suspect that the point of Odds & Ends is not to waste time interpreting. I
am invited but I donât attend, and thatâs good enough. Even though there might be
some sort of relevant truth in the mind of the artist, him who delivers it through a
disparate selection of drawings, I want to keep the exhibition away from utilitarianism
and believe it doesnât want to teach me. Itâs sufficient for me to experience that
pleasing alienation of not being in Le Bonâs shoes, while guessing they exist, and
they might even look smart. I am reminded of how psychologist Théodore Flournoy
recalled a medium séance and his spiritual interaction with Esenale, the main
interpreter of Martian language in the early 20th century (according to him):
Esenale has gone away ... he has left me alone ... but he will return, ... he will soon
return. ... He has taken me by the hand and made me enter the house. ... I do not
know where Esenale is leading me, but he has said to me, "Dode ne haudan te
meche metiche Astane ke de me veche."1
Piero Bisello