Actual Art Duel (Translated from the French Duel d'Art Actuel) "I'd like to work in Europe, but I wouldn't do the same things, I'd do different things. I feel I represent the United States in my art, but I'm not a social critic". Andy : My True Story, Gretchen Berg, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 mars 1967. (citation) After several towns in Europe, the exhibition Andy Warhol : a factory will be shown at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts during the whole summer. That's the occasion for Michel Wauthoz to present these works which have similitude or correspondences with those of Warhol ones. Their subject, their style or their structure present sufficient analogies to justify such a comparison. And if one cannot exclude obviously an underlying influence neither from Pop Art neither from Warhol, have these works however their own original qualities and dissociate themselves from this artistic trend. In view of "the fifteen minutes to fame" invented by Warhol, Wauthoz proposes a confrontation of works whose result is not necessarily profitable to the most known, because the presented works can compete honourably with those shown at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Here we get the "Pope of Pop Art", compared to a "country-priest" who would like to become the "priest of Ars" (le curé d'Ars in french) under the pretext that he has a vocation for Art and an irrepressible passion for Aesthetics. The exhibition WAutHOz versus WArHOl at the gallery SUITE is conceived as a work of art itself, an imitation of the exhibition like any other matter of an art-work : model, landscape, still-life,... On the opposite of the superficiality of WArHOl's works, claimed by himself, the deepness and substance of WAutHOz's images tend to surpass the own flatness of the image, in putting such a denseness of signification into them, that the technical reproducibility of media doesn't change their aura. Laboratories of Dialectic, May 1999. "There is such a competition here that the only manner to exist is to adopt a style the others don't want". The philosophy of Andy Warhol. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975. |