Various Small Fires is pleased to present “I Love Lucie.”
Anat Ebgi and Esther Kim Varet of Various Small Fires have invited Lucie Fontaine to present a solo show to be split between their two Los Angeles galleries. Lucie Fontaine has conceived a series of artworks, each comprised of two parts, which will be divided between the two spaces: half of each piece will be shown at Anat Ebgi, and the other half will be shown at Various Small Fires. By splitting and doubling the exhibition, LucieFontaine seeks to merge notions of form with those of format, acknowledging that the creation of feelings, ideas, objects, images, information and knowledge cannot be understood apart from the channels through which these forms are distributed—from conception to presentation to promotion of an exhibition, for example. Lucie Fontaine embraces those channels by freely mixing and matching “split” concepts belonging to disparate realms of the history of humankind, including: 1. Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic presented in his Phenomenology of Spirit; 2. The diptych in art history; 3. Symbiosis in biology; 4. The Chinese “One Divides into Two” [一分为二] controversy of 1964 between philosophers and Maoists; 5. Labor divisions between art employer and art employee, dealer and artist, artist and curator, dealer and collector and so on.
For this project, Lucie Fontaine puts love at the center of her cerebral promiscuity. For Lucie Fontaine, love in all of its manifestations—love for your partner, love for yourself, love for God, love for what we do, love as friendship—transforms, making the singular into pluralities of streams of pleasure. Yet love’s authenticity inevitably comes laced with a sense of irony, which Lucie Fontaine fully embraces by opening her exhibition on Valentine’s Day, the day love becomes capital. Today, all that is immaterial, even love itself, has been transmuted into commodities, which is no news considering the sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church. The capitalization of feelings, and the capitalization of love, may be the clearest visualization of a reality where the opposition between what is material (stuff) and what is immaterial (feelings) no longer makes sense.
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Lucie Fontaine lives and works in Colmar, France, from which she willingly distributes her signature, authorship, creativity, and labor through many avenues: art making, exhibition organizing, art collecting, writing, and editing, to mention those she already tried. To learn more about her activities in Milan, where her space is located, and elsewhere, please visit her website at www.luciefontaine.com or email her employees.