Didier Courbot is working. Continually. He will work for two years on something that he will complete in five minutes. If you like, call him lazy. Yet, there is more good intention towards the public in this strategy than anything else. And lightness too. And the superficially simple questions: How does art work? What makes it possible? How can it stand in front of you? The latter is a question of fragility. And like the question ‘why do we breath?’ it can be found in everything that surrounds us.
In his upcoming exhibition at Susan Hobbs Gallery, a new corpus of work will illustrate these subjects and method of practice. Characteristically, Courbot works with what remains: the domestic scraps of marble table tops, odd pieces of wood, leftovers of paper after a model or rudimentary sculpture is made. Here, extending from his Table Work series, plinths and stands are presented as themselves. Some display a thing; some are empty. A blur of sculpture as a definition. Other works, made from thin brass, play with a series of hand-drawn posters that are themselves offered as pre-sculpture. Within each, a series of reduced geometric shapes in primary colours can be cut-up to form a variety of three-dimensional, cone-shaped volumes. However Courbot complicates this relationship to replication by supplanting mechanical apparatus with physical action; he describe how “rather than duplicating the multiples with a machine—in this case a printer—I wanted to be the machine.”
Image Credit: Didier Courbot, “Untitled” 2015
Photo credit: Toni Hafkenscheid, Courtesy Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto
