2013
From Gesture to Language

The exhibition, From Gesture to Language, sets out to articulate the link between conceptual art and traditional visual art techniques. Although all visual art is expressed in form, can the substance of the work be overlooked to allow the audience to read the basic concept be ind the work of art ? However, choosing a basic concept as a display object raises an issue of principle: can the visual artist reduce the form of his work down to the point where the message in his work can be read merely though words? Could Bruce Nauman’s lettrist neon signs and Jenny Holzer’s monumental projections be considered as books before objects to be viewed ?

Beyond its first formal, or even figurative, appearance every classical work of art obviously only exists in an abstract form in the mind – “Painting is a mental occupation”, stated Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolas Poussin. Up to this point, therefore, nothing new… The relationship between classical works of art and reading is so natural that an enlightened public did not claim to look at, but to read, a painting. It is following this intellectualized line of thinking about art that the rationale for conceptual artists can be discovered.

From Gesture to Language intends to bring together conceptual creation with another approach which has challenged visual arts in the XXth century: minimalism, or l’Arte povera. This was an approach which also aimed to reduce the work of art down to the underpinning structure. No letters, no words, simply an arrangement of pure forms, like new essential elements in an embryonic universe; this is how François Morellet’s Lamentation rouge should be experienced.

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