In a letter dated 1926 the French surrealist artist Claude Cahun wrote ‘If it does not upset your plans, would you make it Tuesday instead of Wednesday?’ The letter was addressed merely ‘Dear Friend’, the person unidentified. Later in the letter Cahun quotes from a poem she wrote a few months before ‘It does not look true but it is true’.
Simon Le Ruez’s practice and recent works could be seen to take a degree of empathy from the sentiment within these words. He is first and foremost a sculptor and installation artist but in recent years his practice has extended to incorporate drawing, video and photography. His eclectic mix of materials and media produce scenarios where themes of longing, concealment, transgression and release are played out, often underscored by dark humour, a knowing impenetrability and an emotional charge.
His recent works might suggest some sort of plan, but like Claude Cahun’s proposition in the letter they are simultaneously about its unmaking or changing. A deconstruction is at play and what remains are varying forms of opposition.
‘It does not look true but it is true’ certainly acknowledges a conflict but again also a strangeness where all is not as it seems. This notion in particular could be applied to the photographic projection work Mariannenplatz, 2010, where anonymous people have been photographed through a window, their identity further concealed by coloured balls that have been stuck to the window’s glass and which always hide their faces. This work sets a rhythm and concern present in many of Le Ruez's works, where the viewer is fully implicated in a series of unfolding tensions, where ideas are often explored in relation to particular spaces and where the potential for movement and change is a pertinent one.
Simon Le Ruez
Lives Sheffield (UK) and Berlin (Germany)
Sheffield
United Kingdom
Europe
I remember when I was 18 or so I would go to nightclubs in Manchester and take E or acid and shadows shifting up and down the walls swans, red glass purred me to sleep candle at my mum's ornaments...
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