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Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

"I consider my images and objects as tools, articles of use: practical above all else,"—J-L.M.

 

 

"The various works in the exhibition...are unified by what Moulène calls his underlying protocols, his working paradigm of topology and dynamic systems. This unique modus operandi enables a non-monotonic entanglement between the producer, the production, and the product, that is between the artist, his imagination encountering the volition of materials, and the artwork. Following a protocol, or certain autonomous directives, implies acting in accordance with the ramifying transits between thought and matter. As Reza Negarestani writes in an essay accompanying the show, Moulène proceeds in 'search for integrity in variation,' looking 'for opportunities to partake in variations on the basis of their underlying invariances.'

 

"When he employs the physico-mathematical entity of a knot as a protocol of construction, for instance, Moulène transcends the conventional view of art as a transitive between the artist and the world. He rediscovers the task of art in its power to rearrange and destabilize the configurational relations between understanding, imagination, and embodiment, which opens up an amplified field of ambiguity. This space of controlled ambiguity is generative, however, inasmuch as it demands new strategies and produces possibilities for the orientation of thought. Thus Moulène reactivates abstraction as 'the art of rendering intelligible the mutual perturbations of thought and matter,' Negarestani continues, 'by organizing the space through which their respective forces are expressed.' Here the artist sets out to exercise the emancipatory procedure of liberating thought from the grip of any external cause that might determine it. 'The task of abstraction in this scenario,' Negarestani explains, 'is to liberate the virtual subject—the designated force of thought.'

 

"...In this sense, he constantly annihilates the sterile dualities of the inside and the outside, the negative and the positive space, as well as of the abstract and the concrete."—Miguel Abreu Gallery