SOHO2OCHELSEA Gallery
511 West 25th Street, Suite 605, New York NY 10001
Francine LeClercq
Mise en [s]cène
September 4 to October 2, 2007
The chosen title, mise en [s]cène in view of its inferred meaning : the act of stage setting, or more pertinently: the surrounding of an event, with a bracketed “s”, is a virtual gloss laid over none other but the illustrious title of Leonardo da Vinci’s La Cène more commonly known in English as The Last Supper. One of the most enigmatic paintings yet known not only by virtue of its dismal state and the difficulties of its restoration but equally by the complexities and the multitude of clues that has engaged generations of copyists and thinkers, resurrected as it were in Francine LeClercq’s in situ installation seeming like a clinical autopsy with a disembodied table, it serves as a backdrop to find the ancestral link of painting and its context back to da Vinci’s mural.
This is Francine LeClercq’s third solo exhibition in which she continues to investigate the conditions and parameters by which a work whether selected i.e. ready made or produced can be brought to the fore and be judged as art, from inception, the modes and conventions of its production, context and specificity, to its existential status vis-à-vis the viewer.
