ART-PRESENTATION: Christian Boltanski-Saynètes Comiques

Born in Paris in 1944, Christian Boltanski is a self-taught artist, who began painting at the age of 14. He is known for a body of work that may be considered a disturbing archive of our social, cultural, ethnic, and personal histories. Christian Boltanski’s work over the past 40 years has focused in different ways on the notion of individual identity, on the ways in which we strive to create and maintain it, and the degree to which it is lost in the midst of collective experience.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

Christian Boltanski’s series “Saynètes Comiques” (1974) are on show at the Librairie Marian Goodman. In that series artist reveals himself in scenes from his childhood in a clown-like manner. Christian Boltanski practiced painting until the end of the 1960s. From 1970 to 1973, he created  “Vitrines de references” by subverting museographic codes: made or found objects are exhibited as evidence of a banal life of which only some traces, at times even absurd ones, remain. In 1972, the “L’Album Photographique de la Famille “ presented at Documenta in Kassel and launchesd his international career. In “Saynètes Comiques” he puts himself in a clownish way, mimicking scenes from his childhood (but they are universal memories), in the form of sketches and took on the various family roles in black-and-white photographs. “I got the idea of telling the story of my childhood, since this was my ‘brand image’ but in a new way, in a clownish way.”  Similar episodes are acted in a film in which Boltanski plays the role of one of his parents or his grandfather and a doll is disguised as a young child that of “Little Christian”.  “The grandfather’s scolding”, “The forced family dinner” or “The unjust punishment” are some of the episodes, at first they seem comical scenes but these are a pure representation of a child’s life. The exhibition also includes other works from a series of touched photographs using colored oil crayon in a style inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, as well as a selection of artist’s books published in 1974 and 1975.

Info: Librairie Marian Goodman, 66 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 12/1-17/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com