“By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread, till thou return unto the bottom,” says the Bible, when God tells Adam after the unique sin and the next expulsion from paradise that he should now earn his residing via toil and laborious work. Labour serves to earn a residing or to safe the requirements of life and has been understood since antiquity because the antithesis of freedom. Karl Marx outlined work because the common class of human existence, which, nevertheless, has been alienated underneath capitalism and thus loses any high quality of a artistic pressure.

Gilles Jacot’s exhibition, “Loaf,” addresses questions associated to work, livelihood, and life’s actions. In two new work complexes, which come collectively within the exhibition to type an experiential area, Jacot not solely addresses the present working and residing circumstances in our neoliberal society but additionally offers with the socio-economic circumstances underneath which artwork is created, dissolved, or imitated.

The collection Clone relies on pictures the artist took on the set of one in every of his “bread and butter” jobs: for the promoting shoot of a big Swiss jewellery firm, Jacot adorned a Paris gallery with art-like objects to mimic the ambiance and aesthetics of an exhibition in a clear white dice.The black-and-white pictures, which present the view behind the scenes, have been processed by the artist based on tips he developed himself: utilizing a Mondrian-like geometric grid of coloured verticals and horizontals, which have been developed from Publish-It notes, Jacot covers all of the individuals concerned within the work course of seen within the footage. The ensuing picture collages, which Jacot presents on self-made plasterboard columns, present the disappearance of people in favor of the consumption of labor energy and materialize in their very own approach what Karl Marx already known as “the hidden web site of manufacturing.” Jacot raises questions concerning the extent to which our present residing circumstances encourage lively participation and the way we will fight mutual alienation.

At first look, the collection Sorted appears to have been a part of the promoting set design. Even when this isn’t the case, the 2 work complexes are instantly associated to one another: the questions Jacot raises within the Clone collection are additional mirrored in Sorted, however relate extra to the body of reference of artwork itself. Jacot’s spatial-sculptural intervention creates a state of affairs through which historical-aesthetic artwork mechanisms are uncovered. Within the context of the exhibition, the drawers mounted on the partitions act like an indexical signal within the custom of the ready-made however on the identical time symbolically confer with the discourse of sculpture and structure (of their memory of skyscraper facades). As neither pure sculpture nor pure structure, in addition to an object of utility, the drawers moderately set in movement a steady interplay of the circumstances of manufacturing and reception of each discourses. The result’s an set up that—similar to sure conditions in Minimal Artwork—makes it attainable to expertise one’s personal (bodily) relationship and reception in area as a mirrored expertise by way of the focused placement of the objects in area. With out lapsing right into a simplistic representational gesture, Gilles Jacot displays on the questions addressed and creates a situation within the exhibition area through which recursive processes are triggered that confer with voids, each presenting them and making them tangible.

—Marie-France Rafael

at Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf
till October 1, 2023