Francesco
Finizio

11.09.2024

Dialogues avec la grande distribution

2001
Presentation of the correspondencies at Espace Paul Ricard, during the exhibition ”Lost in the supermarket", Paris

Dialogues avec la grande distribution activates the multitude through a play of polyphonic voices. Approxiamtely two dozen heteronymies send letters and photos to their favorite supermarket’s customer service department and occassionally the management itself to share their often esthetically oriented ambitions, experiments, epiphanies and suggestions.

These characters take the supermarket flyers they receive in the mail literally to engage a dialog. They unwittingly push the latter’s discourse of trust, confidence, and closeness to the absurd.
Take Michel Poletti, a laborer bedridden indefinitely after an on-the-job accident. He sends framed photos as a token of appreciation with his letter to inform three different supermarkets how his sister has used the advertising flyers she’s collected to decorate his bedroom and bring some color into his life.
Another that comes to mind is the father of Richard Baudevin, at wit’s end regarding his art school flunky son’s conceptual excesses, sends a hefty portfolio of his supermarket inspired works directly to the central headquarters of the Casino supermarket chains in Saint Etienne hoping to land the young man a job photographing products or even just stocking shelves.
These epistolary exchanges appear as photocopies or reproductions (since the originals were mailed out) accompanied by occasional answers (originals these) under plates of glass on 15 linear meters of tables whose geometry varies.

Like other works from this period, Dialogs functions like an archive of more or less plausible propositions whose efficiency resides in their fragile state of existence.

Dialogues avec la grande distribution uses conceptual art’s protocols to spawn fiction intended to test the limits of the logic upholding communication protocols.
Like Polyphonic Dream transmitter, Open Line and Read and Weed center (Centre de Tri Visuel), Dialogues avec la grande distribution is one and multiple: its homogeneous superstructure borrows the established esthetic codes to better propagate its heteroclite harvest of works. Something close to an anthropological vision of art seems to define itself.

Présentation de Dialogues avec la grande distribution, à l'Espace Paul Ricard, lors de l'exposition "Lost in the supermarket", Paris, 2001

Dialogues avec la grande distribution, 2001
Présentation des correspondances à la Galerie Commune, Tourcoing

Photos : Florian Kleinefenn


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