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François DEY, Are You OK?

This interview was previously published in Revista Arta / Arta Magazine, no. 18/ 2016 under the title CLEARNESS MEANS HONESTY

 

 François Dey, To Do This Week, 2011, Galerie van Gelder

 

Bogdan Teodorescu: Are you in good shape for the interview? 

François Dey: Yeah, just got out of the swimming pool, it always gives me total power! 

BT: First, do you believe in success? 

FD: I guess I do somehow, but I try to shift it into a more personal form of success, like enlightenment for example. This is real success. But likewise it would be interesting to see how what I found to be mine I can offer to others, bringing them something, which is very difficult to measure. It’s a matter of exchange. That’s similar with the limitations of a medium; a painting in a room for example, makes me feel it’s not enough. I often feel I want to interact and perform by acting directly on something. Speaking about success, it’s funny how artists, or at least some of them, see themselves as one of the great artists of the past… 

BT: Let's imagine one day you have a truly great success; you are rich and have a unanimous respect. How would things change? 

FD: This I just can't imagine. Neither can I imagine the reaction I would have in front of harsh criticism; I am much attached to comfort maybe, like a child in the arms of their mother. BT: Do you like museums?

FD: I love museums, especially when they’re empty. I like nature more. 

BT: What about your art, do you see it presented and preserved in a museum? 

FD: I don’t care too much if my art is preserved or not, though I’d like it to survive as an archive for the others and research purposes. I am fond of the idea of free resources. I hang out lately in libraries a lot, searching for tapes, slides, digging every corner, whatever drawer. It’s very different compared to the internet, your head, your body are moving, your arms too. Not forgetting the space. Museums are such mechanisms! You know, 350 000 people a year for a small museum… I hate the public in museums. BT: They say sometimes people keep (old) art alive. Is it true? 

FD: No. 

BT: When asked to offer some advice for young artists, John Baldessari said, amongst other things: talent is cheap. What do you think about this? I’m referring about A Brief History of John Baldessari by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. 

FD: Well, talent is a waste of time to me because it makes me stay on the surface. I have a surface talent; I learn fast the first steps and mimic well, but then I stop. This is just easy satisfaction, a sort of masturbation. 

BT: How do you perceive your national identity? 

FD: Sometimes I’m happy and proud, I feel like a civilized person (laughs). Honestly, I prefer to consider myself a light man, outside my national identity. 

BT: Still, as a Swiss do you feel different, tagged by Swiss manners and social conventions? 

FD: I’m a Swiss product. I try to fight against it, but in a way like a love-and-hate relationship. 

BT: Is it important to have a definition of art? 

FD: I guess I even see the word definition as a crater inside our understanding, which nonetheless creates dialogue. I guess this works for certain people, but we're an “out of the box generation”, the structuralisms one. Surfacing is quite dangerous, I mean not going deep and keeping just a bird's eye view. I need a lot of structure. 

BT: They say good pieces of art have humour and clarity, do you agree with that? FD: Yeah, clarity is great. This is a challenge for me, I have a problem with that; I’m like a cloud of smoke that tries to mystify too much. Clarity means honesty. 

BT: Should we always reach a conclusion? 

FD: No, but we tend to and feel comfortable understanding certain facts. Conclusions are short-cuts; I’m inclined to look too much for it. Paradoxically, sometimes clear work seems to have no conclusion. BT: How far are you from tradition? 

FD: I enjoy more and more mixing sorts of things and trying to get out of the defined limits of what this or that is. The danger is that in the end you find yourself in the middle of uncertainty. My gallerist worries when coming to present my work to the public (laughs). He’s often wondering what to tell them. 

BT: Finally, I noticed in your work the presence of the lonely wanderer, the character of an errant. I suppose it's directly related to you and your personal inquietudes

FD: I do not know why I’m lonely, but of course I like the hermit and the fool, escaping the crowed and the noise to isolate themselves a bit in the woods. I like those who face disappointment too; they gave up on society, in many cases they don’t have anything to lose. They’re free. Reality and realistic motifs create waves inside me and the more miserable I feel, the more energized I get. These waves turn into a something like a strange happy mood. It’s dualistic, two-dimensional and again, paradoxical. Seems we are damned with the number 2… a bit like our body, symmetrical stuff: two sexes, two hands… two eyes… 

 

http://www.galerievangelder.com/artists/dey.html

https://laps-rietveld.nl/?p=6063

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