Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux and the Art of Diverting the Gaze

The exhibition Voyez-vous ça ! by the French artist Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, held at the MAC VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Vitry-sur-Seine, originates from a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou within the Constellation programme, which inaugurates a five-year partnership between the two institutions. It offers an opportunity to re-examine a figure whose practice, launched in the 1980s, has spanned performance, collage, theoretical writing and interventions in which the boundary between high art and popular culture is constantly put into question. Labelle-Rojoux, born in 1950, has over time developed a language built on visual assemblage, cut-up and remix. His work draws on references to art history and pop culture, on irony and on what he himself describes as marginal forms, that is, creative territories that escape the official codes of criticism and the market. The exhibition is divided into three sections, LCDB, SMS and ++, each displayed in its own space and unified by a title intended not to explain but rather to interrupt, surprise and divert the gaze. Voyez-vous ça ! is in fact a phrase that evokes wonder, astonishment and even mockery, rather than suggesting a linear reading of the work. The SMS section features the series Stop Making Sense, one of the most significant bodies of work from the recent period. It consists of 365 collages produced daily between October 2021 and October 2022, an exercise in visual and mental accumulation that echoes the serial rhythm of performative practices. The images layer themselves in a flow of pop icons, musical references, graphic fragments and cut-out figures, forming an ironic and dissonant counter-archive designed to disrupt the linearity of the gaze.