Patrick Javault: The part of labour From tools to mass-produced vehicles, and from industrial architecture to rural settings, Didier Marcel's work is a perpetual discovery of geographical and social landscapes that are mostly indifferent, and sometimes truly cold. They are cursory, as though glimpsed between the great acts of history, and contain few if any exotic or surprising elements, but rather the raw materials of images, with indices and textures that evoke and make visible, or palpable, situations that are common in every sense. It is up to the viewer to produce an equation (partly mental, partly physical) whereby the scene(s) can be imagined. The environment is generally that of the Trente Glorieuses (France's three halcyon post-WW2 decades), insofar as they continue to exist, if only in the collective memory. This coverage of territories, with their more or less recent history, is overlaid by a free form of displacement within an artistic geography that goes from new realism to the simulacra of postmodernism, via arte povera. The induction of proximity between diverse, and more or less remarkable, types of profession is combined with a vision of abandoned activities, or places, that echoes the doubts and hesitations of the artist in his studio.

Marcel's guiding insight would seem to be that art qua work is always a way of bringing up, rather than bringing out, an order or a structure in a universe that is close at hand, but from which a section of a certain size must be detached if indifference is to be overcome. He seeks to fill in the distance that separates us from things, and frequently replicates them so as to apprehend their signification and the way they function. But there is nothing systematic in this approach: the scale varies, and objects are sometimes “sampled” and rearranged. The architectural elements mostly take the form of models, though in some cases they are presented in their original form. The graffiti-emblazoned breezeblock hut on the carpeted floor, for example, indicates the value the artist places on this found object, but also a certain incredulity with regard to photography. The reality that can be recorded by a still or a video camera is less important than the reactualisation of a situation; and the presence of the carpet reproduces, by analogy, something of the visual shock. The hut is an object without any character of its own, to be made and remade wherever. What gives the piece its identity is the anachronistic graffiti, which could not have been invented. The intensity of the effect (breezeblocks on a carpet) fades away behind the vivacity of the memory. Through redevelopment areas and rural landscapes, Marcel plays with dimensions. He reflects on his position and size in a tale that is mundanely marvellous (or marvellously mundane), as if the adult and the child were living together within him. The viewer, following on from him, must then do some tweaking, carry out some changes in focus, and simultaneously occupy several bodies.

In Coucher de Soleil (“Sunset”), too, there is a barely-altered readymade – an old agricultural machine. It is certainly magnified; but the title, the shadow on the wall and the inclined plane covered with blue carpet lead us into the beauty of an instant. To “whisper” the image of a sunset in a field without either representing it or making concessions to the picturesque requires a certain presence-absence (the machine, with its radiating wheels, being partly dematerialised by a beam of light).

Tools offer a primary introduction into this universe without figures, and it is with an upholsterer's stapler in whitewashed cardboard that Marcel's work really begins. This delicate, slightly zoomorphic piece holds our attention through the way the artist uses it to define a place and a position. While drawing could have brought out only the linear purity of a form dictated by a function, and photography could have denoted the full sense of the object, this imperfect double suggests the distance posited by art: less good is better. One of the origins of the ready-made, after all, was the recognition of the peerless perfection of technical objects, for example the propeller that Duchamp pointed out to Léger and Brancusi. Didier Marcel's stapler has artistic value to the exact extent that it is first of all an instrument of awareness, a useless utensil that makes it possible to immobilise things without claiming to have grasped them.

The three concrete mixers in plaster and metal enlarge the social field covered by this work. Without denying its quasi-initiatory character, or the fact that it settles an old score with the ghost of Duchamp, Didier Marcel reconciles the machinery of bygone days with large-scale improvisation. These concrete mixers follow on from La Broyeuse de chocolat (“The chocolate grinder”), but with a deviation of sense rather than a variation. The solitary pleasure of the bachelor grinding cocoa beans is replaced by three machines associated with construction. Three – in other words a series, already. But we are also being warned against object fetishism, and even against a certain fascination with “making”, given that the differences between the three original models are infinitesimal. On another level, there is a parodic dismembering of the decadent, solipsistic artist, as opposed to the “producer” who wants to use his art to talk about social realities. The grinder holds out a promise of small joys, whereas the concrete mixer is directly linked to the concept of a house, as an allusion to a form of success or accomplishment. It is work as punishment, showing the tip of its nose – the point being to finish the house, which holds out a prospect of comfort and repose. Work and leisure go together, and are incarnated in a (false) triad of the (almost) identical. With his concrete mixers, Marcel has found a means to reflect (on) his activity, and to liquidate some of his liabilities – which in itself is no mean achievement. It was Wim Delvoye who subsequently, with caustic irony, celebrated the baroque beauty of the concrete mixer.

With his preference for tools and instruments of work in the readymades that he sometimes chooses to “assist”, Marcel re-creates a link between conceptual art and constructivism – between artistic production, labour and home repairs, as if, through variations of scale and space, he wanted to establish a genuine circulation of air between separate spheres. Thus, putting together an image of nature with birch logs placed on dappled synthetic fur, he produces a vision of an interior scene that vacillates, revealing a slight flaw in the occupant. The offstage aspect of this installation could be a romantic adventure in a snow-swathed wood, a way of feeling Russian; or, more prosaically, a nameless individual's dream of a secret order. Is the coefficient of art a eulogy of the game, and an ability to shift the reference points of the domestic universe; or is it, more simply, a knack of seeing the big picture in a simple way ? When, in another installation, the birch logs are given stainless steel tips, an aesthetic of the knife-rest is articulated onto a vision of open spaces, and the way in which they are traversed and experienced – a feeling of dizziness that is amplified by the spirals on the mirrors. It is a landscape of ice, or a cold store; a neo-pop decor and an indeterminate space with blankets to take the edge off the solitude. Here, nature is at her least welcoming, her most refractory to the individual – who in any case no longer knows how to approach her. Interior landscape or artificial arrangement ? In this particular case, it comes down to the same thing. In general, Marcel's incomplete landscapes, where action seems to have been suspended, bring out the meaning of a framing – the way it cuts into a territory and produces a feeling of both plenitude and shortfall.

The double perspective, or double drift, induced by the landscape of birches, can also be found in 101, 102, 103, 104. The green turntable is as much the trophy of an individual cloistered in memories, conjuring up an image of dreams with a collection of mopeds that have marked his life, as a paradise of teenage love (which is what the artist would actually seem to be suggesting). It provides a possibility of going beyond the sudden interruption of the linear progression (four designs that cover a range), and the pain of non-return. The two levels of interpretation, far from interfering with or contradicting each other, co-exist, in that the fetish-vehicles constitute a means of compensating for loss, and bringing a moment of happiness back to indefinite life. Here, Marcel shows once more his ability to combine platitude and lyricism. The possible tale of four young people going off to the forest on their mopeds shades into the production of the rotating display in such a way that we project a deformed double – a collector of mopeds – onto the artist. In the same way that it is but a short step from the organisation of an exhibition venue to that of a territory (with respect to the representation of a vision), it is also a short step from an artist identifying indices to a collector of objects who finds it hard to leave his adolescence behind, or from a creation that puts things in a balanced, even-handed way to the repetition ad nauseam of a story, just because it happens to be the best one around.

Marcel's installations occupy space the way a person might take possession of a new office, so as to create openings for the eye and the imagination. But the visions suggested by these structures rarely take us far in space, and scarcely any further in time. Looking at photographs of his exhibitions, one is struck by the number of encounters between models of warehouses, tools and the kinds of renovated semi-industrial spaces that are used, these days, for exhibiting art while at the same time conserving the names of their previous functions, as if they were fitted into one another rather than intercommunicating, so that one could not always tell the inside from the outside.

In their own way, Marcel's exhibitions also document the ways in which spaces devoted to art are constructed, often in former commercial premises; and the artistic activity is sometimes linked in complex ways to the world of work. Placing a painted metal pallet side by side with a model establishes a formal similarity between functionalist architecture and a usable object (a cliche, of course); but we are also being invited to consider the model in its literality rather than as a representation. And when Marcel places models on stands or rotating structures in a way that suggests a trade fair, he is injecting still more aporia into the nature of the circumstances that bring us together. Is this an art exhibition, or the rediscovery of an industrial heritage; or again, a promotion of ruined industrial landscapes – a Hubert Robert of the ghetto, for neo-romantics ? Marcel does not proceed by allegories or categorical assertions, but by trial and error, and probings of reality. What he does is to freeze images and situations. It might be said, indeed, that he does not appropriate objects in order to show what an artist can do with them, but borrows them in order to place them in a state of commonality. The production of doubles or simulacra does not so much signify a distancing as a desire for detachment, the better to bring out the truly sculptural dimension of a thing or an object.

(s)cultures is a vision of a ploughed field detached to the point of its abstractive inscription in a landscape. It also produces the strange feeling of a “rise” which looks, to begin with, like a fall. One might, of course, think of Pascali, whose irrigated field can be seen just a few metres away; but the most obvious affinity is with the informal – Dubuffet's “materiologies” and “texturologies”, or Burri's Cretti. Unlike the great “upenders” (and one might also recall Rauschenberg, with his Bed), Marcel's aim is not so much to turn a fragment of cultivated nature into a block of natural culture as to construct a field of forces and energy, to seize the effects of a telluric power for which very few artists have managed to find a gestural correlate. The earth rises up, and the installation leads us subtly from the chthonic to the cosmic. Not without irony, the slope along which we approach it is covered with green matting whose chromatism has more in common with the office than the great outdoors. But is there any point in the register of oppositions: work/art, town/country, and the rest ? (s)cultures, as a production of field and a field of production, reminds us that things can be elucidated only by being measured one against the another; that the true dimension of a sculpture or a painting can (also) be experienced by pacing out a terrain; and that this exhibition is consummated in the freedom it gives us to move around different “sensitive” spaces and zones, and to take off by taking on the most immediate possible cognisance of reality.