I am interested in objects, elements of common or symbolic exchange, whose real presences establish society between bodies.
- Jean-Luc Moulène

Jean-Luc Moulène is a major artist on the French scene. For nearly forty years, he has been charting a unique course that eludes categories of genre and style, through a dizzying body of work that includes photographic images, books, sculptures, paintings and installations.

The exhibition Objets et faits (Objects and facts) brings together twenty-four works created between 1978 and 2018. It offers a journey through the artist’s multifarious practice in the form of objective poetry—a writing in space “without plinth or ceremony”, in which each work simultaneously refers to all of the others.

It is a chance for Jean-Luc Moulène to present new works in which questions of heritage, genealogy and kinship open new perspectives in his approach.

At the centre of the exhibition, an installation entitled Cosmos, consisting of two continuously moving mirrors, induces a physical and mental displacement of bodies, objects and spaces, while literally putting the viewer to work. The geometry of the surrounding architecture, the gazing games between the viewers and the works are infinitely reconfigured by the mirrors’ slow displacement in the space.  

The exhibition at the Synagogue de Delme is another step in Jean-Luc Moulène’s research through action: as an unrepentant philosopher or poet, he never stops asking questions that are put to the test of the material: what is the shape of a colour? How can one be in a pair? What is the shape of a communal space? What unbinds bodies and objects?

The work Cosmos was produced in collaboration with the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, which presented it for the first time at the exhibition En angle mort at La Verrière in Brussels from 19 January to 31 March 2018 (curator: Guillaume Désanges).