Claude Closky

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Manège, by Claude Closky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2006

Claude Closky is a French artist born in Paris in 1963. Closky trained at the École Normale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris).

He won the "Grand prix des Arts plastiques" (1999) and the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2006).

At first sight, Claude Closky is an artist who rubs shoulders with immateriality. He is at ease with electronic media, and some of the objects he makes do not reveal themselves instantly: the books, for example. Among the materials he uses — images, texts, numbers, and sounds sampled from our environment — language seems to be the most direct instrument of appropriation. But this does not make his work any less concerned with its material specificity, its degree of visibility, with how it occupies the space.

Closky takes hold of the most ordinary modes of everyday communication and lays open its forms by discreetly re-articulating it, or redistributing visibility or words. He plays with the day-to-day rules, codes and hierarchies that punctuate our existence.

You think you’re slipping into automatic actions, but in fact you have entered a maze. The result can be surprising, the disappointment is calculated, and a persistent throbbing remains.