expo en cours(extraits)
« Peanuts
François Curlet has taken Charlie Brown, the famous star of the comic strip, as a kind of alter ego. In 2000, when “Peanuts” stopped being published in the magazine in which it was periodically published, he decided to seek a solution to the new problem of Charlie Brown and get him off the dole. In view of his professional experience, he prepared him a small cardboard cart for selling peanuts in the Paris underground as many people do in fact habitually do.This slightly malicious joke had a kind of whiplash effect, there and back, of considering Charlie Brown to be a real character and finding him the most suitable job for his skills, to present this sales cart in the context of an exhibition, in which we go back to the fiction terrain. And it is just here, in the fiction terrain, in that of art and culture,
that Charlie Brown, a character on the dole who sells peanuts in the street, on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder, reappears as Charlie Brown, the alter ego of the artist, as an example of the treatment received and of the place that art and culture occupy and what is taken care of in art and culture.
It does not seem to be chance that it is precisely Charlie Brown, an almost adolescent child, that is the character chosen by François Curlet as the object of some of his works, an artist who is bringing back the irreverent and questioning tradition of all the social conventionalism of Dadaism. Probably, those for whom Hugo Ball’s fancy dress corresponded to the category of ridiculous, will also slot into the same category the making of a flag out of wool with the zigzag motive of Charlie’s Brown’s jersey (Charlie Brown flag). However, it has a lot more to do with the absurd, not that of Charlie Brown, but that of the flags. »
