Ron Mueck at the Fondation Cartier

Images of three new works by sculptor Ron Mueck, a pressing pretext for his splendid new exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, had a more or less immediate impact on the media: circulation, reproducibility and everything that is a long way off from the shy slowness with which the works are produced. However, a beautiful film by Gautier Deblonde lets us into the calm of the studio, and for the first time lays bare the creative process behind the sculptures. Now, like fetishes, the sculptures have been relocated in the macabre superficial consumption of the contemporary. Like a contemporary Lilliput, they escape the potent ritual work that is the stamp of exorcising presences of sacral imitations of real life. At the Fondation Cartier an ambiguous young couple, a woman carrying shopping, and an elderly couple under an umbrella all directly renew the magic that only this extraordinary Australian artist is capable of.

In 2005, his first French exhibition in these very same galleries attracted a record number of visitors that is as yet unbeaten, despite the fact that the stars that showed in subsequent years were of the calibre of David Lynch, Takeshi Kitano and Patti Smith. Almost ten years ago, five works made especially for the occasion proved to be the masterpieces we know today. The colossal figure of a woman in bed — In Bed — is unforgettable, as is the splendid miniature of the Spooning Couple. The drama of the couple appears to be a central theme in Mueck’s work. This time they are in a standing position, two figures petrified in an act of secret conflict; in 2005 the spooning position of the reclining characters, now held by the Tate in London, seemed to betray the end of a relationship or definitive abandonment. Now, as then, Mueck proceeds with an analytical dissection of the narrative inherent in everyday life, communicated through gestures and minimal, almost secret, signs that only great artists pick up on to reveal archetypal relationships with the world.

I believe it is for convenience that Mueck is defined by many as hyperrealist in the books and chronicles that concern the history of contemporary art. Along with Gerard Richter, he is one of the most political artists around, and among the few artists who overturn and criticise the perfection of the image. In the case of such a shy artist — Mueck does not give interviews —, Gautier Deblonde’s film of incomparable formal elegance reveals the ritual and deeply sculptural element, rather than the bare work of the studio.
  The film makes a splendid accompaniment to the exhibition — made up of just a few selected pieces that are cleverly positioned and in perfect tension — with Grazia Quaroni’s curating playing a key role. It is not the intimacy of Mueck that is revealed since, aside from the sculptural skill that puts him with the greats, it would really be time for the moderns to move over — from Rodin to Rosso, Brancusi, Giacometti — rather than hide this exquisite innate classicism, that goes back to Caravaggio or Boecklin.

Mueck looks at the world, not at images. He is not an artisan but a political activist, intent on providing us with proof of our alienated relationship with the world. Evidence of naked life, as Giorgio Agamben calls it, fed with the same thinking as the great philosophers. Our relationship with the world is there, where Walter Benjamin archived it in minute calligraphy, along with the puppet-masters of science fiction films. It is also there in the sculpture assembled in pieces by Rodin or the exhausting sittings of Giacometti.

Ron Mueck fortunately escapes the simplistic museum spectacle of the waxworks of Madame Tussauds or the Musée Grevin, going against the détournement of that aesthetic. His relationship with reality is not post-pop, like hyperrealism. It is, more simply, the unveiling of the wicked conscience of the image. A double funeral, where what is real challenges imitations of power. Mueck is crude, like Courbet in The Origin of the World.
  It is not a specular relationship; the effect of scale and presence in his works is there to remind us that the list of operations of seeing is linked to the complexity of feeling, and that synesthesia is a consumed and invisible game of relationship.  We are no longer spectators but people intent on measuring, through the paradoxical beauty of Mueck’s work, the spectral nature of our presence. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 29 September 2013
Ron Mueck Fondation Cartier per l'Art Contemporain 261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris