A lecture-performance by Guillaume Désanges, assisted by Alexandra Delage

Signs and Wonders proposes a subjective study of some major figures of modern art, as well as minimal and conceptual art, in the form of a mystical investigation. The work will question the links between forms and signs, art and Cabala, nature and culture, and coincidences and symbols. The lecture follows a scenario that proposes to bring to light on how certain elementary geometric patterns related to rational and mathematical models have fed into twentieth century avant-gardes and in modernity in general. Désanges suggests that nowadays these patterns remain objects of representation and of knowledge, but also of cult and worship. From Marcel Duchamp and Kasimir Malevitch to Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman or Dan Graham, the lecture consists of investigating, in a spirit of adventure, how the observation of repetitive signs and of their archaic symbolism might tell us a secret history of modernity, a hidden language, a code or a mystical tradition, with its initiates, filiations, occult rituals and heresies.
Speculation based on a game of coincidences, the lecture is entirely illustrated through a shadow play, realised on stage without virtuosity, yet with a desire to demonstrate and work with shapes, light and darkness. An opportunity to measure the illusionist and magical potential of practices that we sometimes too easily pigeon-hole in the category of rationalism. What you see is not always what you see.
Signs and Wonders is co-produced by Halles de Schaerbeek (Bruxelles), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and FRAC Lorraine (Metz). It has been presented at Tate Modern (London) in february 2009