Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

38
Les Prairies's artists
MICHEL AUBRY
Le Grand Jeu, 2011. Detail of the installation at the Galerie nationale de la Tapisserie
(Beauvais), exhibition Décor & Installations, 2011. Photography : Michel Aubry.
This large-scale wall installation is composed of familiar elements
from Michel Aubry's work: carpets, military uniforms, camouflage
fabric, pieces of furniture, a card table, a military map, and
Maoist propaganda objects. The carpets had various uses and
origins. There are Afghan rugs, mats from children's games and
from casinos. The themed assembly brings games and political
and war strategy together in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The
composition is on a grand scale and accentuates the ornamental
qualities of the decontextualised objects. Aubry works on the
patterns, their referents and their connotations, making semantic
switches between war and play and creating a theatre on the
wall to emphasise the old alliance between the two. The patterns
become signs whose meanings are mutually affected by contact
with one another. The twin notions of ornament and politics recall
the great frescoes of 15th and 16th century Italian cities. The work is
like a ceremonial, ritual object, redolent of an altar cloth, standing
horizontal objects vertically. Le Grand Jeu operates in (at least)
two ways. It eulogises and at the same time pillories a particular
political iconography, and ideology, dealing with the end of the
great communist empires and evoking their apotheosis. This is a
post-communist fresco, that associates Afghanistan, the USSR and
China with casinos, and pokes fun at political fetishism.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1959 in Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët (France), lives and works
in Paris (France).