Matta-Clark through the eyes of Didier Faustino

Crossing the threshold of a white shop-front denoting work-in-progress to enter a small gallery in Saint Germain de Près, Paris and be plunged into a world where Didier Faustino meets Gordon Matta-Clark is a little like going on a site visit. Here, what has been created in the Natalie Seroussi gallery is not simply the setting for an exhibition but rather an event in itself, focusing on the possibilities for relationships between the body and architecture.

The marvellous photographs and pieces of anarchitecture shown, made by Matta-Clark before his death now over 35 years ago, remain integral and powerful, just like his deconstructivist thinking overall. Didier Faustino's intervention in the gallery strives to reactivate these manipulative practices.

Once again the building is engaged with and treated like a poetic object given that both — the anarchitect and the mésarchitect — work within an explosive and plastic grammar, even in the documentary residues. The materials employed are simple: the naked tautology of the building-site with its scaffolding poles, plywood, and the concrete gesture that cuts diagonally across the small space. Certainly, to reinterpret with such extreme naturalness the iconoclastic and minimalist interventions of decoupage seen in Office Baroque (1977) or Conical Intersect (1975-1978) is for Faustino to retrace Matta-Clark's steps. The roots of Faustino's work — and he has never made a secret of it — all lie in the mark of the American artist, in a fascination with the work of this giant, now celebrated at a museum level as one of the Olympians of contemporary artistic practice.

More than the writing and the minimal line of his operations, Faustino seems alert to a desire to evoke the aspect that binds Matta-Clark more to performance than architecture. In the specific case of this small tribute, Faustino is even more closely connected to the work in-situ, given the fact that as from next winter he will be remodelling gallery spaces. This is not an act of curating, then, but an actual architectural exercise. To reassemble an idea and use the words of Matta-Clark, this could be "the search for the most simple way of creating something complex, without having to construct or add anything".

Also very interesting is the small and meticulous collection of texts and interviews that accompany the exhibition, brought together in the gallery newspaper 34 rue de Seine. Similar to construction material, the texts all relate to projects and interventions realised by Matta-Clark, such as two splendid interviews — the first with Florent Bex, honorary director of the MuHKA in Antwerp and the second with filmmaker Marc Petitjean, a great filmic reference behind the architectural endeavours of the artist.

Focusing this exhibition on two "making-ofs"— Office Baroque and Conical Intersect — is to restore the contingent and theatrical dimension of anarchitecture along with the relationship with a real public, in which the building site becomes a setting. It is this social dimension of sculpture that has inspired Didier Faustino to resituate the sensitive pieces on display, part of the arabesque panorama drawn by Matta-Clark, a minimalist dreamer. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 19 December 2012
Interventions: Photographs by Gordon Matta-Clark, exhibition design by Didier Faustino
Galerie Natalie Seroussi
34 rue de Seine, Paris