Matter and Form, Self-evidence and Surprise: On Jean-Luc Moulène's Objects

Matter and Form, Self-evidence and Surprise: On Jean-Luc Moulène's Objects Alain Badiou May 2019Sequence PressBilingual edition: English/FrenchForeword by Miguel AbreuTranslated by Robin MackayDesigned by General Working GroupCasebound, 203 x 152 mm, 96pp.57 color imagesISBN 978-0-9975674-9-6 I see Moulène’s works as the artistic equivalent to an essential philosophical quest, the pursuit of a new peace, an absolute peace. Like the great philosophers, Jean-Luc Moulène creates something which, rising up against the fatal violence of the world as it is, indicates the human spirit’s capacity to propose to all what we might paradoxically call an idealist materiality. “Idealist” in so far as, in the works of this artist, certain entirely unknown forms impose upon disparate materials—through the use of images, scans, topologies, digital manipulations and complex tools—a sort of startlingly clear and striking self-evidence. And “materiality” because, beneath the novelty of the form, beneath