Julien Prévieux
Management of Change and Conflict
Jousse Entreprise Gallery | 24 rue Louise Weiss | 75013 PARIS
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In the wake of Letters of non-motivation, Julien Prévieux is extending his questioning of value production (economic, symbolic, linguistic) and the notion of work and labor in the age of "cognitive" capitalism. By contrasting it with his o wn capacities of behavioral prediction and analysis, the artist strives to decipher, through a set of new pieces, a world marked by far-reaching ideological changes, but he also comes up with ways of living in it.

Have a Rest
The exhibition is organized around a central sculpture, a replica of the first supercomputer designed by Seymour Cray in 1977 for the N.S.A. The artist tackles this symbol of scientific positivism and the desire for power, and comes up with an artisan's version, at once a totem with magic powers and a piece of furniture made of leather and hardwood on which visitors may sit down.
 
In Search of the Economic Miracle
A series of drawings titled “In Search of the Economic Miracle” presents ground-breaking writings in the field of modern economic thinking (Marx, Smith, Ricardo...) like so many oracles capable of predicting the future. By applying to them traditional decoding techniques, the artist extricates hidden meanings from them. By way of clusters of keywords and interlaces he maps the ways in which contemporary socio-economic systems are both functional and dysfunctional.
 
F.A.Q.
This collection of “abstract” paintings is presenting a series of geometric motifs associated with terms concerning social issues (education, sexual deviance, psychiatry, public interest…). These combinations, often used for book covers, involve the relation between accumulated knowledge and over-interpretation, formulation and formalization: to what degree do these motifs model the concepts referred to?
 
La Malette n°1
This suitcase is the result of an action carried out in May 2006, during which the artist stole the finger-prints of the french Minister of the Interior. These are turned into stamps for practical use. Julien Previeux confiscates the procedures of control systems, ever more marked by a desire for profitability: from data capture without prior consent to the storage of data by way of the possibility of transmitting them to other systems for other uses.

Sticking with his procedures involving the introduction of one logic system to another, Julien Prévieux produces decorative forms based on the most trivial economic, sociological and political reality, to try and "arrange it". This copyist's approach, befitting an amateur DIY oddjobman getting to grips with the surface of things, illustrates a real strategy: counter-productiveness as a form of resistance.

Contacts : www.jousse-entreprise.com | contact@previeux.net