John Armleder: Jacques Garcia

A conversation

Imagine the meeting of an artist, often linked to the neo-geo movement of the 1980s, with a decorator who voluntarily defines himself as one of the last upholders of “great taste”—it is this improbable collaboration that the present work attests, documenting the invitation made to Jacques Garcia by John Armleder to conceive an apartment in the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris. The creative register of the former —which extends from Zen minimalism to a neo-gothic overload, and from the exoticism of Napoleon I “Return from Egypt-style” with the extravagance of Napoleon III—echoes through “Furniture Scupltures” and the practice of accumulation and juxtapositions of the styles of the latter, of which the elastic references go from modernism to Op art by way of Hawaiian folkloric culture.