Matej Kren

The installation Histoire de l’art explores the notions of memory and knowledge. Using ten identical tables arranged in a row, the artist puts art history – quite literally – into perspective. Each table is covered with a piece of cloth, part tablecloth, part shroud, spattered with the ink from the books it has erased. A receptacle for the lost meaning of words that have become illegible, the cloth becomes the medium for abstract painting. These art history books, closed and erased, laid on the tables, deny their own function as a vector for knowledge and enter art history as objects in their own right. The fact that they are erased, far from being a negation of art, opens the way for an exploration of its durability and its history.