Emmanuel Saulnier

In Paris and in Tokyo, Emmanuel Saulnier has composed two dialoguing exhibitions. Inspired by the music of Thelonious Monk, they are like twin interpretations of the same tune, while representing the latest phase in more than forty years of artistic experimentation.

Black Dancing and ATM are two curves in a single loop spread between the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Fondation Hermès inTokyo. They are also two performances of the same score with slight variations in tone. One is dark, the other, lighter. Each develops in three phases, and one begins where the other ends. Both confront us with ourselves and with otherness, with space and with light, with sculpture and music, with belief and the unconscious. Thelonious Monk is the pole star for both. At the Palais de Tokyo, Black Dancing was a theater, created by Saulnier in his dialogue with curator Katell Jaffrès. A little way outside the exhibition space, visitors were drawn to Keys, a sculpture that seemed to hover over the ground. Made of nine glass tubes filled with water, held in place by hooks, also in glass, and placed on a base formed by black books. These tubes are, in the artist’s own words, “a base for thought.” For an artist who is at once religious and anarchistic, they may also be books, books in scroll form inspired by Asia, or perhaps the Torah. The Pyrex from which they are made is itself made with burned wood. “At the bottom of transparency there is an opacity.”