LAB[AU] | BOTANIQUE : BOOK LAUNCH

On July 4th at 6:30 pm, join LAb[au] for a book launch and signing of the exhibition catalog for their exhibition POSSIBLES | PROBABLES at Botanique.

At the origin of this exhibition project, a simple question: how do you fill an empty, white page until it becomes full and black? For each new attempt, each new chapter, a rule is defined: proportionality, fibonacci sequence, linear progression, random, stochastic... and others, more singular, unclassifiable. Slowly, chapter after chapter, a lexicon is built up, potentially indexing all possible ways of performing the assigned task, filling the page... And the question is now completed as follows: is there an end to our imagination, to the possible? Infinity?

In this intellectual construction, the blank page can be understood and perceived as the starting point of all artistic work, a singularity. In concrete terms, it is both the object and the subject of the work. It becomes the conceptual structure, a simple idea, enabling us to reflect on Art. The procedural (systemic) nature of the work exposes our ability (or limitations) to translate all artistic thought into written, formal rules and, as such, exposes the relationship between Art and Language.

The exhibition is divided into four walls, four sections, in keeping with the approach and broad outlines of LAb[au]'s conceptual and methodological work: painting, writing, calculating and transcoding. Evolving between semiotics (meaning, sign) and aesthetics (form), the project is a continuation of their research. It can also be understood as a form of introspection, a way of looking at art as a philosophical question, a way of approaching the very nature of art.

This lexicon, or field of possibilities and probabilities, never finished, always completed, is just one stage in a work that, without repeating itself, has only one end and no end. On the walls of the Botanique, thousands of framed pages, an architecture of "what exists and what doesn't (yet)", showing only a tiny, and very large, fragment of the possible and probable.