Press announcement 28.05.2010
Solo exhibition – Colorless green ideas sleep furiously*
Julien Prévieux
Open: 09.06.2010 — 17.07.2010, Opening: Wednesday 9th of June at 5 pm

Julien Prévieux (FR, 1974) creates with his interventions a makeable world. Prévieux makes socially engaged performances, videos, photos and drawings. In his new installations he collaborates closely with scientists and does research on knowledge and on new manners of applying knowledge. Past and actuality form a wonderful symbiosis in his work. West proudly presents two large scale installations and a video in the first solo exhibition of Julien Prévieux in the Netherlands.

In the installation The totality of true propositions (before) Prévieux takes the audience on a time trip. A round bookcase containing a large collection of aged books on technology, media and economy is placed in the center of the installation. However informative these books are, they show how knowledge can be fleeting. In the course of time the information often becomes obsolete and may remain nothing more than a curiosity to us. One part of the collection contains books with future theories. We now live in the time predicted and we may look at things very differently. By means of a software program the artist makes drawings that depict information from these books. He calculates possible events and connects them. The large amount of information and the technical approach to the subject make these drawings very confrontational.

The houses of ‘great thinkers’ are subjects of the work The Housing Estate. The small, snow-white and fragile houses are models of houses in which philosophers, musicians and writers lived and worked. Prévieux places them next to each other and thus makes a spatial planning of the thoughts of great thinkers. With the small size of the houses he emphasizes the difference between private and public, furniture and property and between isolation and liberation. Because of the reputation of their residents, these houses gain social significance.

Furthermore Prévieux is going to show the video What Shall We Do Next?. The animated video is an ‘archive of gestures to come’. The drawn gestures are movements that we (possibly) make using laptops, gaming computers or other devices but the related interfaces have not been invented yet. The artwork even, as The Housing Estate, is about privacy and function but placing the emphasis on body and technology.

Prévieux’s work was previously shown at the 48th Venice Biennale, the 10th Istanbul Biennial and the art fairs Fiac in Paris, Liste in Basel and Pulse in New York. His work is part of the collections of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain de la ville de Paris and of Frac Brittany and Frac Nord-Pas-de-Calais. His work was exhibited at international solo exhibitions such as Window 42 in London, Galerie Jousse Enterprise in Paris and at the San Francisco Art Institute. He participated in group exhibitions at various locations including the Grand Palais and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

On the occasion of this exhibition a small booklet will be published with a prologue by Liliane Albertazzi (art historian).