It has been twenty years that they’ve been pulling at the blanket with a complicity that is more and more natural with every passing year. Their love of a good joke is without compromise. Year after year, Jean-Paul Lefeuvre and Didier André reaffirm their language: a form of craftwork that is both modest and laborious, giving them center ring in their own particular sort of “slow circus”.
This new show aspires towards a minimalism that gives precedence to this brand of craftwork. Working to the bone each and every one of the props they found in the back of the shed (a board, a shovel, a sledgehammer…), they transform these everyday items with their ever-meticulous dexterity. In their careful hands, these objects are made to move, given a life, a soul and at times go even further, by becoming actual partners or, once in a while, stealing the limelight.
The circle is no longer the shape these artists evolve in. Now their exploits take place in a rectangle, one that looks like a petanque ground or a tennis court or a giant pool table… In any case the rules stay the same, and are the sacred rules of the sandpit: any and all fantasy is welcome but must be applied with care. Taking themselves far without taking themselves seriously, that is the hardest task of all.
Stripped of artifice, economical in motion, these two create a world of their own in which the useless argues happily with the paltry, and the absurd stretches to a laugh. Until, at the end, poetry appears as the common denominator of all those efforts in vain...