La Reconnaissance des motifs

“Indubitably, he gleans images and objects.
“Indubitably, he collects. For himself and by proxy, laying claim to the wonders and curiosities in the reserves of the improbable museums where he likes to spend his summer holidays.
“Indubitably, in addition to all this, there are composition and exhibition. He speaks of ‘displays’ and what people often notice is his astonishing capacity for (intra)spatial organisation. Nor is it really surprising that he’s one of those artists who are also curators, rearrangement being among his core concerns.
“Despite all this (of which I’m obviously convinced), I think it’s maybe too easily forgotten that Guillaume Constantin is first and foremost a sculptor.” (Marie Cantos)

This monograph explores all these facets of the work of Guillaume Constantin. It presents several perspectives on the works, showing their relationship with space and the details of their composition. The volume also contains an interview, a glossary and essays offering theoretical, descriptive and subjective appreciations of the artist’s work.

Appropriation, recycling, diversion and other displacements, transformations and even anachronisms inhabit the work of Guillaume Constantin. Essentially working in modes of sculpture and installation, he regularly conceives of his work in new or pre-existing exhibition spaces, including museums. He investigates relationships between the work and the object, their collection and their modes of exposition, including their circulation and history in different contexts, putting in tension conservation and disappearance, visibility and absence. The artist literally puts the conditions of exhibition into play as he proposes a rewriting and a rereading, summoning the memory and the traces of the past.

In the final stages of layout for this book, Guillaume Constantin intervened on certain pages to integrate new images, as if the book itself was an exhibition work. If this framing allowed him to appropriate the representation of his own work, it also created doubt as to what he is showing us, making this book a veritable artist’s book.