15 Jun 2015

KMD–Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art

The 28th exhibition of the KMD will be showing—under the title 'The Possible is in the Mind'—Gea Casolaro's 'pencil' (2015), which, instead of for writing or drawing, can be used only for erasing and nothing else; some of Robert Filliou's famous, differently sized, colored dice, with which, instead of the numbers one to six, one can throw only one colored dot; and some of Cildo Meireles's folding rulers (1992/2009), which feature none of the units of measurement with which we are familiar and so reduce every process of measurement—no matter how sensibly intended—to absurdity. These three subtle and tongue-in-cheek conceptual works on the sense and nonsense of our day-to-day reality are complemented by a white portrait bust—titled Anne—by the wonderful, yet largely forgotten French-speaking Swiss artist Blanche Perrelet Fiaux. It is our mind alone that enables us to depart from the norm and to risk the unconventional and thus render useful what we normally consider to be irksome, useless, absurd and futile. And it is also our mind alone that permits us to abstract from ourselves and to consider the 'obvious other.' In this regard, the exhibited works open up new ways of thinking and perceiving that we have perhaps never before sought ourselves, being unable to imagine how enchanting and enriching their unknown secrets are: serendipity.

Gea Casolaro was born in Rome in 1965 and today lives and works in Paris and Rome. Most of her works, which are mainly photographic, have remembering and forgetting as their theme. Robert Filliou was born in Sauve, France, in 1926 and died in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, France, in 1987. He was one of the main exponents of the Fluxus movement. Cildo Meireles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 and today counts among the best known conceptual artists of Brazil. Blanche Perrelet Fiaux was born in Lausanne, in 1878, and died in Jongny, Switzerland, in 1953. She was a Swiss painter and sculptor, the wife of the portrait painter Paul Perrelet and the sister of the artists Lilo Fiaux and Roger Fiaux.