Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

Do not disturb

It is indeed deeply exciting to follow the bare-handed reinvention of sculpture conducted in a systematic manner by the Franco-British duo Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel for the past fifteen years. In so doing, they resume the endeavour Flaubert had started through his alter egos Bouvard and Pécuchet until death forced him to quit. Studying sculpture with the undiminished enthusiasm of neophytes, Dewar & Gicquel approach it as a problem to be solved: they remorselessly take it apart to expose for all to see its abominable paradoxes.

After 1968, we were told that sculpture had disappeared, dissolved in the “visual arts,” but Dewar & Gicquel know too well – just as the IRS knows – that this was a trick: sculpture is more relevant and alive than ever, thumbing its nose at painting, which has now migrated to Instagram. Illiterate invocations of Duchamp notwithstanding, sculpture has been working with roughly the same categories ever since the Middle Ages, and the currency remains valid: narration, celebration, monumentalisation, the glorification of power and sexuality. This means that sculpture can still enter public space like a bull in a china shop and provoke the kind of excited reactions that set the social media atwitter.

At the same time (and not unparadoxically), the attempt was made in order to debase sculpture to reduce it to the product of an industry: after all it was just an object. The contradiction was invented and artificially maintained between, on the one hand, a serial practice using machines or the techniques of the workman and, on the other, the artistic touch of the ever more deified creator. Sculpture was forced to take sides: banal decorative gadget or luxury relic. It was taken hostage.

By manually and repetitiously making copies of the most anonymous industrial models of functional objects, and striving to retain their potential utility, Dewar & Gicquel free sculpture and compose a triumphal ode to our times. For them, domestic plumbing is «the allegory of ceramics in sculpture». Indeed, plumbing is one of the major artworks produced by the Western empire under the banner of America, as Duchamp noted, already, back in 1917. Like latter-day Assyrians, Dewar & Gicquel are celebrating this sanitary conquest in three high-relief ceramic pieces that, against a grid of standard- format tiles, present series of modelled WCs, washbasins (observing as they do so that it is very difficult to find an “anonymous” model, since designers have a tendency to let go) and soap dishes: all alike and, because of the manual process, all different.

To complete this environment of copies without originals conceived for Galerie Loevenbruck, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel have made a fourth tiled mural in which a frieze of pipes, alternately accid and erect, point their spouts at various mouth- heights in a timely reminder that, still more than plumbing, it is the human body that, even when absent, shapes our civilisation.

-Veronique Wiesinger, July 2016