Jean-Luc Moulène
Il Nodo di Livorno. Curated by Michel Blancsubé

For Alan Vega. See/Saw

Apart from the obvious benefits of showing in a highly regarded museum, producing work with and for an institution is frequently a burdensome, fatiguing business. More and more artists are coming up with less restrictive ways of doing what they do, and it’s often small, flexible outfits like Carico Massimo that provide the right kind of venue.

Situated in a former warehouse in Livorno’s port area, Carico Massimo is an independent, not-for-profit venture thought up and run by a handful of artists and curators. Jean-Luc Moulène landed in nearby Pisa late on the afternoon of Wednesday 20 July. He knew what he wanted to do, but had never seen the space he’d been invited to do it in. He knew it from diagrams and photos, but—and this is reassuring—tricks like these can never replace a flesh and blood visit.

Between Thursday 21 and Sunday 24, Moulène partially closed off the inside of Carico Massimo with a trefoil knot made of planks coated alternately with tar and fluorescent yellow paint. The pine boards in question are 4 meters long, 15 centimeters wide, and 2.3 centimeters thick, and their color changes from tar- brown to yellow when the structure of the building imposes a change of direction or you come to the end of the 4 meters without some obstacle forcing you to saw the plank. With no beginning, no end, and three points of intersection, the shape consumes some 140 linear meters of wood. Moulène says the knot’s been on his mind for four years; the one in Livorno was made in four days.

In a fun game doubtless inspired by the digital exploits now part of our everyday existence, we can mentally delete the building and imagine the knot as a free-floating entity: tensioned between the walls, the floor and the ceiling, the body snatcher is on view right from the entrance, swallowing three of its edges which, like the interior columns, are
made of rigid steel joists filled in (or not) with cement. Removed from its context, the assemblage would reconstruct the space’s volume and its intricacies in the form of a faithful imprint. A temporary guest in a building a hundred years old, il nodo di livorno functions as a three-dimensional gauge rod for a fixed volume whose boundaries it measures.

In their fake shoring-up of a heedless room, props and columns collaborate, bringing supports and surfaces together so that this knot stripped bare by Moulène, even, will let itself be penetrated, shared, followed, and traversed.

This is a hymn to love!

Michel Blancsubé,
Paris, August 10, 2016

Betweenpointandline… Jean-Luc Moulène

between point and line, colors
between point and line, native, original matter
between point and line, articulations
between point and line, continuity
between point and line, pauses
between point and line, primordial bitumen
between point and line, yellow fluo 502…pigment son of industrial man
between point and line, a sequence
between point and line (that makes the infinite)
between point and line, directions
between point and line, ecstasy
between point and line, musicality
between point and line, a spatial distribution
between point and line, an ethos
between point and line, a sequence that would like to be home
between point and line, a chant
between point and line, a refrain
between point and line, a vibrato
between point and line, a man that unfolds

Juan Pablo Macías,
Livorno, August 10, 2016

photos: Juan Pablo Macías