TEXT KIPRAS — Arthur Cordier

Maybe we made ourselves blind voluntarily. Perhaps there is always something lurking behind the forgotten and ignored. For how could, from the pitch-black darkness, come so much light and life; from tar so much energy that eventually it could implode the world from within and tear it to pieces? How can verdant and luscious greenery vegetate in the soil of gloomiest shades and that same greenery turn into a putrefying stench of compost? How can so much richness hide in the dullest nooks of the world?

To tell you the truth, I always found green and black an odd couple.

An oddness not unlike that of people eating fries with ice cream. But I nonetheless thought that there is something freakishly satisfying in dissonance, in queerness, in peculiarities, in strange relations. Whether in couples or colors, whenever we encounter disorder, we may find a glimpse of unintentional harmony. Shouldn’t we say that entropy is harmonious, then? In its own offbeat way, I mean.

For ages beauty was associated with harmony and order. But I doubt we ever truly considered how beautiful disarray can be, for we always sought shelter from chaos, or it seems to me. Just look how desperately we try to keep everything neat. Trash must be picked, sick people must be separated from the healthy, prisoners kept in their cells. Maybe now things are slowly becoming different. Maybe now we are brave enough to see beyond the orderly and pristine arrangements. Maybe we are coming to realize that there is more to filth than we think?

But I get it, harmony is contentment; It’s suiting. We judge our time spent observing an ordered universe as time well spent. Isn’t it a vicious cycle? Now it becomes crystal-clear to me why we call imposed harmony by the name of beauty. But is that all there is to beauty? Doesn’t harmony pacify conflicts, establish an illusion of order, make one relaxed, and produce dream-like languor. Isn’t it merely a cop-out?

Yet, as a rebellious youth, I’m fonder of dazzling confusion, of vertigoes, of frivolous play, of futile squandering of my precious energy. I like to daydream and drown in my reveries and spend my energy constructing irrational narratives and absurd scenarios. My mind and body are more inclined towards the incongruous and unfamiliar; my heart expands more when an array of clouds overwhelms the horizon than when I discern an elephant’s tusk or a pig’s snout in a lonely cloud’s shape. I enjoy when imposed order crumbles. For instance when you witness a pile of garbage stacked near a container or a mountain of rubble left near the construction site in an otherwise sanitary city. I adore microwaves or washing machines thrown on the sidewalk by carefree and light-hearted anonymous spirits. I secretly love those who litter and justify it by stating that without their littering janitors would be out of job. You can crucify me for my honesty, call me an ignorant and foolish person, but I stand firm by my statements. For me these are instances that remind me of another world where obsession with accumulation, control, and order doesn’t reign over us.

Sometimes my thoughts, too, flow in disorder, like a letter without an address. Sometimes a thought or a melody pops up in my mind--and do what you will, point a gun at me or something-- I still couldn’t tell you where it came from. Disorder does that. It’s, if you permit this fancy term, acausal. It’s of its own kind. Independent and autonomous. This means that behind every imposed order there hides an abundance of disorder, of energy squandered without remorse. Disorder always disguises itself in the form of order only to burst forth and surprise those who believe that they are in control. It’s like death that spares you once or twice just to come and snatch you away when the time is right.

Disorder appears uncalled for. Like when you are driving on a highway and a trunk is in front of you and for a moment you are mesmerized by its loose tarpaulin dancing in the wind, bequeathing you to join the dance and steer along the rhythm of its delicate movements. And you enter a vortex that sucks you in, and you try to trace the entire history of that mystical, loose tarpaulin appearing in front of you on the way to Nottingham Forest or Mendelin or Albuquerque of all places, and you end up understanding that everything is connected and that every road leads not to Rome but Disorder.

Layers of clothing on my skin, layers of meaning behind any word, layers of rules behind any action. Everything is so layered that it gives you an illusion that behind all those layers you may find something static, naked, familiar. But no, behind that pitch-black forest of layers, you find more chaos which is the epitome of infinite layers. Isn’t it beautiful when you give in and let go and see your layered reflection in a puddle of tar?

2023. Written by Kipras Kaukėnas, at the invitation of the artist.

Le jour du goudron, Arthur Cordier
heavy duty PVC and vinyl on aluminum stretchers
2022