Josh Smith

With its explicit references to the history of painting, its "expressive" style, its signature effects and its lack of subject matter, Josh Smith's work could appear to be outdated. This is because Smith refuses to use signs and subjects to assert his contemporaneity. Like all those he refers to - Kirchner, Picasso, Haring or Wool - Smith does not use paint to illustrate a project, but chooses to think "in paint". The quantity of work he produces - a phenomenon he chooses to stage in his installations - is evidence of this thinking in progress. The painting is not seen as a closed place of completion, but as a stage in a continuous process of creation. The watertightness of the boundary between the original and its reproduction - already compromised since the 1960s by the use of silk-screen printing - is undermined from within by the proliferation of originals. This strategy allows Smith to emancipate himself from a hierarchical system that sorts out major and minor works to highlight the very movement of creation. In a world of incessant flows of goods and images, Smith manages to propose an alternative flow that breaks the repetition of the same.

For the EDF-Bazacle space, he designed a bronze sculpture, Happy Fish, in 2011.

Coproduction: Fondation EDF Diversiterre and le Printemps de septembre.