From 15 february to 1st june 2014

 

At the CCC we are presenting the new solo exhibition of artist Guy Limone, a taking a retrospective look at this artist who has been working actively since the end of the 1980s, both in France and internationally. In the light of the experience we at the CCC have had working on retrospectives in recent years, the intention of this exhibition is not to cover the artist’s work exhaustively. Instead we invite the public to discover his work by focussing on one single series, “Statistics”, which the artist has been working on for the last 25 years or so. This series, which is still continuing, has made his name, and constitutes the basis of his exploration, the originating piece for all of his subsequent work. One way of approaching ‘The Statistics’ by Guy Limone is via its unusual and playful relation with numbers and classification, as well as his use of colour, also one of the artist’s major subject matters. This exhibition will put colour in the forefront in a new and unusual way.

 

“Colour is a given for me” Guy Limone is keen to say. If colour is such a essential part of his work, this must surely be because the artist considers himself to be a painter, even if as an artist, he does not use traditional painting methods. Instead he deals with painting indirectly. The materials he uses are tiny figures, collections of day-to-day images, even fluorescent tubes filled with tiny photographs, and all these different elements feature by the hundreds or thousands, in number and exponentially. Guy Limone collects, classifies and rearranges this abundant visual subject matter in an abstract, minimalist way, as if to create order and clarity in a highly complex world. Moving forward making other series developed in parallel, the artist works in a methodical and playful way, giving himself different ground rules, with colour frequently taking a major role.

 

Statistics first appeared in Guy Limone’s work in 1987, shortly after he left the school of Fine Arts (l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts). From then on the artist began using small figures on a scale of 1/87th, repainted and stuck one by one onto walls. He creates miniature crowds, in both colour and black and white, designing circular shapes right on the threshold of visibility. Each piece in the series results from a statistical report he found in the press, so the title of the piece comes from the relevant article. Only 1% of French people dream of becoming Prime Minister (1987), only 14% of French people would be in favour of a society without hierarchy and with no one at its head (1988) – a whole load of scientific facts, intended to give us the measure of the world we live in. But because these become a substitute for reality, we often become indifferent to them, finding them incomplete and detached from us. Guy Limone’s Statistics give back a humanity and a sense of reality to these abstract numbers, putting the individual back in his rightful place within a social context that cannot be represented otherwise.

 

The small coloured patches which the figures create were originally placed on white walls, and these walls have been progressively incorporated into the colour composition becoming the background, and since 2000 they too have been painted with colour. This substantial collection of 15 pieces making up Statistics dating from 1987 to the present day, supported by the series of Fluorescent Tubes, will showcase the diverse and refined game of colour which has always run through the work of Guy Limone.