30 ans du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne – Adams x Burr x De Cointet x Coplans x Cordebard x Craven x Dheurle x Durham x Filliou x Fontcuberta x General Idea x Hains x Hains x Hains x Kasten x Majerus x Majerus x Rondeau x Wall x Welling

In 2013, the 23 FRACS celebrated their 30th anniversary by organizing together an important national series of exhibitions. Under the title Les Pléiades, they prepared a project, with the way artists look at public collections as its basic principle. Throughout this year, each FRAC thus invited one or more artists/creators to conceive an exhibition or a presentation system based on its collection. The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne chose to invite Gavillet & Rust, who have been in charge of its graphic identity since 2008.
The possibilities to look at a collection are numerous and each one of them relates a particular story. The members of Gavillet & Rust were duly invited to write their own narrative, and broached the question in quite an unusual way, by applying to the collection the codes and systems which they use in their everyday practice of graphic design and art. So rather than focus on a “classic” display of works, their interest lay in the representation of these works, choosing twenty reproductions of works that have been then juxtaposed, superimposed, cropped or manipulated, in order to create a series of silkscreened posters in the French format (120 x 176 cm). The published posters are particularly effective and immediately seductive, but they nevertheless remain enigmatic, requiring a second reading time to be revealed in their entirety. If certain “assemblages” are surprising, the wealth of such a proposition must be underscored, with each poster created containing a potential exhibition and offering a different reading of the different works brought together on paper.