Exhibitions
BEGIN WITH A SECRET
Amphithéatre d’Honneur,
Beaux-Arts de Paris, FR,
2023
Press ReleaseBeaux-Arts de Paris, FR,
2023
A bell has a mouth, has a lip, has a waist and a crown. In its center, a bell has a clapper. The clapper, a key.
A clapper strikes, a bell rings, a bell tolls. Sound is a consequence. In the ear is the past.
You ring a doorbell, you giggle in fear, you run away, you hide and wait for someone to open the door to the space you left empty. Ding dong ditch. It’s a game, a prank, but maybe specially a trick or even a trap. Clement’s exhibition, BEGIN WITH A SECRET has a similar quality. It presents itself with a mystic crypticness, yet very quickly reveals that it could potentially be a trick, or a trap.
In the middle of the Amphithéâtre d’Honneur of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, a golden bell clapper rests horizontally on the 19th century wooden parquet, Clement named it Ding Dong. The burgundy walls, the red velvet chairs, the plaster moldings, the intricate marqueterie, the panoramic hémi- cycle painting, hold a space together where time was reverently suspended. All the events, both the past ones and their representations in the paintings, fill the room with silence. Ding Dong creates a tear in this space, in this silence, its horizontal body disturbs it enough to open a separate, indecisive and unstable space, inside the layered baroque surroundings. Someone rings a doorbell and runs away.
There is no bell, only a fallen clapper. Maybe the amphitheater has become the bell and the room’s resonating silence now somehow triggers a mental reconstruction of absent sounds. You can hear the clapper falling, you can hear the bell toll. Not really though, it's your eardrum dreaming in retrospect. That’s where the trick begins. Some sounds are simulations, some are real, some haunt us like echoes of an imagined past, some are facts. The buzzing of the flies that have since died is induced by the delicate black bodies that now sit on the velvet chairs as spectators. Every hour, Clement’s enigmatic voice interrupts you with cryptic phrases that resemble prophecies or fortune cookie wisdom. There is also the sound of your lazy brain that reads the golden subtitles on the burgundy walls, almost integrated to the eventful painting on the wall. But the most ghostly sound of them all is a particular sound of laughter. A subtle chuckle that can turn sometimes into a hysterical burst. This laughter has no origin, has no body to associate it with, but the exhibition feels like it is forever laughing.
BEGIN WITH A SECRET, as an exhibition, inaugurates an indecisive space incapable of choosing if it takes place before or after an event that no one witnesses. It’s like walking into a room after the joke was told, or during an ongoing whispering. Except, that in this case, you are partially in on the secret, and the secret is partially absurd. Not in the sense that it would be devoid of meaning, but in the sense that the obsessive, obtuse necessity for meaning has led to a form of metaphysical failure. The glass traps for the flies haven’t worked, they are empty and the flies assemble randomly, there is no bell for the clapper, and the sound piece that strikes every hour can only be experienced partially. So the room laughs, at you, at itself, and its limitations, it laughs at time, its reality and its fiction. The laughter is a great form of company, it fills the space like the buzzing of the flies, both falsely and fully. There is no real laughter, there are only dead flies. Like in a ding dong ditch, you fall in the trap, you’ve opened the door and nobody's there. Then you wonder if the doorbell rang at all.
Sofía Bonilla Otoya
A clapper strikes, a bell rings, a bell tolls. Sound is a consequence. In the ear is the past.
You ring a doorbell, you giggle in fear, you run away, you hide and wait for someone to open the door to the space you left empty. Ding dong ditch. It’s a game, a prank, but maybe specially a trick or even a trap. Clement’s exhibition, BEGIN WITH A SECRET has a similar quality. It presents itself with a mystic crypticness, yet very quickly reveals that it could potentially be a trick, or a trap.
In the middle of the Amphithéâtre d’Honneur of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, a golden bell clapper rests horizontally on the 19th century wooden parquet, Clement named it Ding Dong. The burgundy walls, the red velvet chairs, the plaster moldings, the intricate marqueterie, the panoramic hémi- cycle painting, hold a space together where time was reverently suspended. All the events, both the past ones and their representations in the paintings, fill the room with silence. Ding Dong creates a tear in this space, in this silence, its horizontal body disturbs it enough to open a separate, indecisive and unstable space, inside the layered baroque surroundings. Someone rings a doorbell and runs away.
There is no bell, only a fallen clapper. Maybe the amphitheater has become the bell and the room’s resonating silence now somehow triggers a mental reconstruction of absent sounds. You can hear the clapper falling, you can hear the bell toll. Not really though, it's your eardrum dreaming in retrospect. That’s where the trick begins. Some sounds are simulations, some are real, some haunt us like echoes of an imagined past, some are facts. The buzzing of the flies that have since died is induced by the delicate black bodies that now sit on the velvet chairs as spectators. Every hour, Clement’s enigmatic voice interrupts you with cryptic phrases that resemble prophecies or fortune cookie wisdom. There is also the sound of your lazy brain that reads the golden subtitles on the burgundy walls, almost integrated to the eventful painting on the wall. But the most ghostly sound of them all is a particular sound of laughter. A subtle chuckle that can turn sometimes into a hysterical burst. This laughter has no origin, has no body to associate it with, but the exhibition feels like it is forever laughing.
BEGIN WITH A SECRET, as an exhibition, inaugurates an indecisive space incapable of choosing if it takes place before or after an event that no one witnesses. It’s like walking into a room after the joke was told, or during an ongoing whispering. Except, that in this case, you are partially in on the secret, and the secret is partially absurd. Not in the sense that it would be devoid of meaning, but in the sense that the obsessive, obtuse necessity for meaning has led to a form of metaphysical failure. The glass traps for the flies haven’t worked, they are empty and the flies assemble randomly, there is no bell for the clapper, and the sound piece that strikes every hour can only be experienced partially. So the room laughs, at you, at itself, and its limitations, it laughs at time, its reality and its fiction. The laughter is a great form of company, it fills the space like the buzzing of the flies, both falsely and fully. There is no real laughter, there are only dead flies. Like in a ding dong ditch, you fall in the trap, you’ve opened the door and nobody's there. Then you wonder if the doorbell rang at all.
Sofía Bonilla Otoya
