1 / the collection / inappropriate /
People have always traveled inside me. Obviously, some have settled. They take me to witness, question me, go beyond me.
I ended up giving them the floor. I rarely agree with this troop, but I am delighted with the din. There are some great people among them. I probably look like the beautiful hours of Chelsea Hotel New York, or something like that. The bar remains open. Night and day. I have never found a key. To the question of the definition of oneself, Pasolini answered: an infinite.
Paul Qwest - June 2016
ARTWORKS /
WARNING / MAUVAIS GENRE
Rimbaud, having decided not to be serious at the age seventeen, found himself deserted by his friends under the pretext of bad taste. He went on to radicalise himself, his conduct becoming unruly and his appearance wild: this particular “mauvais genre” eventually revolutionized the art of poetry.
M / Means that some works on some pages contains content that may be
- either provoking, controversial and potentially offensive for some viewers
- or or rejoicing for others.
2 / ABOUT the collection / A collector - curator /
Paul Qwest is a collector - and also a curator - who claims this activity as an art. He gathers, puts art’s objects together, and produces insurable arrangements, claimed since then as works of art. What makes the works of art here is based on the interactions between the various objects (paintings photographs - drawings - sculptures etc.)
It is the interaction between the different plastic elements, the symbolic, formal relations between them that makes the art work. It is classically the pursuit of the art of composition through a relational art.
What form to make visible what Is unthinkable?
The works of art presented here are constituted by these arrangements, each one is articulated around precise concepts, but produces unanswered questions. These most often address blind spots of rational thought. To understand nothing here is therefore rather a good sign, because it is a question of giving to see what cannot be thought, but I what is experienced well and truly.
Only a small number of them are presented here
3 / IDENTITY / RELATIONAL ART /
The peculiarity of the collection is also due to the fact that most of the artists of the works of art that constitute it, are most often linked, although having their own works and identities. Some of them interact or even work together. We are often faced with a singular collective.
The poet Alex Svi, the photographers Ed Zitther, the outsider art artist David Reahl, are artists present in a recurring way. The collections of found vintage pictures from Zorah Somexski, of anonymus picture - Ghabor collection - has been an integral part since 2015 as well as all Else’s works and painter Séroux work's of art since 2018. Others like Félicien Rops, Marquet, Rubens, Fred Deux ... as well as a multitude of anonymous people also participate of the process.
4 / philosophy of the collection / form is content /
The general philosophy of the collection is addressed in the book NOS VIES COMME EVENEMENT Odile Jacob 2019.
Four cardinal points from the book are discussed below and developed separately.
1 / the Process /
Thinking like an archipelago
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or eventual in its unity, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
The archipelago is the very form of the contemporary world as we see it today. Galaxies, planets, ecosystems, living things, cultures or cities are constellations of stable elements in constant relations.
2 / the metHod /
serendipity
Serendipity,
It's looking for a needle in a haystack,
and finding the farmer's daughter.
Pek Van Andel
Ironically, the royal method of making discoveries is an counter-method, one that we do not control. Serendipity, or the art of taking advantage of random good luck, cannot be controlled more than chance can be.
3 / the Aesthetic /
a poetics of relation
I am made of parts that can fit into many mechanisms; and elements that make up an infinity of combinations.
Paul Valéry
The writer Harry Mulisch had noted our little conservative penchant common to all: "When
visiting someone, we always sit at the place we occupied the first time". Many more details than we believe follow this law. We go where we've been before, we do what we've done, we see who we know. To know this inexorable numbness is already to stop it a little.
4 / the question /
who iS "I" in us?
Whoever thinks he is himself is wrong,
Me, I am various and
I do not belong to myself.
Fernando Pessoa
In Posthumous Fragments, Nietzsche, speaks of the body as an "incredible community of living beings," of a plural entity composed of "spirits", "souls," or "forces" in perpetual interaction.
It would form an "aristocracy" in the sense that some of the beings of the body are dominant and others dominated.
5 / THE HORIZON / Outrages and Ravishments
Even though we can be overwhelmed by beauty at any one time in our lives, those moments often go hand in hand with a darkness that disturbs our emotions. Or makes them more complex, more uncertain, but also richer. It is in those moments that we experience an intensity that seems supernatural and reveals to us a new dimension of our existence.
Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered,
is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.
Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists,
and does not seem to require so much an active energy,
as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it.
But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality,
but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it.
In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself,
to display all her boundless faculties,
and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities
Benjamin Franklin
Report of commissioners charged by the King of France,
with the examination of the animal magnetism
1783
5 / pUBLICAtion
With to nearly sixty-six discoveries and genius traits, often unknown, new horizons are emerging here. The very form of the book is that of archipelago thinking at work in the interconnected contemporary space. The book's content provides the reader with unprecedented tools for reflection and action for a world that is also unprecedented.
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