“Working on Sundays”.

(…) Working on Sundays, or doing a job that isn’t a job. Pretending to do something, doing nothing at all or playing the amateur. This strange idea that opposes work and free time, with its arrangements in space and time. When I’m caught up in a mental device of this kind, my interpretations become productive. Indeed (…), if we take up the interpretative thread of working on Sundays, i.e. doing work that isn’t work at all, like trimming your hedge, or rebuilding Notre Dame out of matchsticks, what do you get? For an artist, if we pull on this string, what do we get? Do we touch on posture? Are we playing artist (as we play gardener or architect)? Just one day a week, where no one will be the judge? A Tefal surface for criticism, where history is dismissed as irrelevant? So what does it mean to be an artist on Sunday? And what does it mean to be an artist when Sundays are every day? (…)

(…) Fortunately, there is a space of sophisticated ambiguity: the copy. Copying Leonardo’s famous painting can be a lifetime’s work. The fact remains that, as a copy, it produces no added value. There’s a unique vacancy in the profitability of work. So Sunday work demands absolute humility, and puts social and economic rewards to death with total and stupid injustice. That’s why I chose to copy LAROUSSE (the 1966 Petit Larousse Illustré dictionary). I’m not taking on Leonardo, low profile, but this immense project far exceeds the number of Sundays in my life, whatever the day of the week. So a little sentence scribbled on a POST-IT can occupy a man’s entire life. (…)

Excerpts from an interview with Marie Dupas for the catalog “travailler le dimanche”, 2021.

(…) Thinking about our project, with the plans for the HAB in front of me, I imagine a scenography in the shape of open pages. Large open pages, as if thrown to the wind, reminiscent of that sublime painting by Katsushika Hokusai: Windy Day at Ejiri… Putting the wind at the heart of the device in a paradoxical scripta volent. (…)

Extract from a letter sent to Marie Dupas, 2020.

(…) He said to me: “Words are like anti-personnel mines. One day, one of them will explode and the copy will be finished. That’s the way it is! One of them will sign his death warrant, he recalls, and this pact signed with words and death for over 35 years will be fatal to him. He accepts it (…)

Excerpt from Isabelle De Maison Rouge’s text: I entered a tunnel, as if sucked in. 2024