Christian Boltanski

Born in 1944 in Paris (FR)
Lives and works in Malakoff (FR)

Composition divertissante

1983
Colour photographs, cibachrome, triptych
174 x 268 cm
Year of Purchase: 1984

Christian Boltanski is one of the most important French artists of his generation. His work usually takes the form of shrewdly composed installations. These include accumulations of retrieved objects, whose display, in the form of collections, is bound up with his own biography, and, in a more general way, with childhood, the tragic destiny of the Jews, the Shoah… The result is that his whole œuvre is deeply pathetic and particularly poignant. The objects (textual traces, photographs of victims and executioners, old clothes), whether presented flat in display cases or arranged in space, have the value of relics to which the artistic gesture lends a style, particularly thanks to the sophisticated use of light. The archive (real or fictitious) can in effect be illuminated or left in shadow. The at once conceptual and expressive nature of the works produces a dull and violent impact, one that is destructive but silent. Composition divertissante, a photographic work produced in 1983, is the split second capture of a fleeting moment. From three derisory scraps of fabric, the artist has managed to make a grand and sumptuous composition. Two fantastic figures frame a star of David whose frayed textile matter, probably confusingly, conjures up the distinctive sign which the Nazis forced Jews to wear. The triptych is at once the photographic evidence of a given situation (toys animated by light) and the grandiose fresco of a fantastic vision whose ‘entertaining’ dimension cannot altogether smother the solemnity of the subject. It is like a burning bush, which burns but is not consumed.

^{Olivier Goetz}