CLAUDE CLOSKY

“The exponential development of the flux of information has metamorphosed it into decor. And it is awareness of this media ambiance that Closky (1963) strives for. In his art, McLuhan’s illustrious formula is extended : if the message is the medium and if the medium is the decor then, logically, the message is the decor. This furnishing word is what Bla-bla (1998) addresses us with : a luminous sign board on which a series of phrases are displayed, exchanges that are too long for the viewer’s faculty of memory.

The artist found the subject in question in celebrity magazines, in the “readers’ letters” sections or in adverts and has assembled them so as to construct dialogues which are as coherent as they are insipid : “The bathroom is an important room for me / Yes, perhaps the most important room in the house / I spend hours in there and it’s very difficult to get me out / I spend a lot of time preening myself / I spend time in the shower, in scalding water / It’s an absolute pleasure / I dream, I think, I sing... [...]. The metadialogue of hypermedia emptiness. For ten minutes every hour, the geometrics of the LED display races, forgets the language and only takes into account the purely formal parameters. The media tool takes the path of abstraction by overworking (...).”

The emptiness of the message of Bla-bla is also found in Guili guili, in which Closky “re-appropriates magazine images and decorates them with meaningless onomatopoeia. This collection is disconcerting for its simplicity and efficiency in leading us into a sort of game in which we try to guess the multiple developments to come. ”

Michel Gauthier

Claude Closky, a great manipulator of media signs, creates semantic decoys, throwing our perception and our construction of reality out of kilter. With Sans titre (ski), Claude Closky shows us one of the icons of our consumer society, an athletic-looking skier, with the blue sky as backdrop. A “sport and vacation” spirit, a “mens sana in corpora sano” (a sound mind in a sound body) illustration, if you will, of our western way of life. The image is a cliché; it is, per se, a fiction. Claude Closky duplicates this mirage by using an illusionist “trick”: the same image is projected once on the left, once on the right, which animates it and gives it life... seemingly.

Claude Closky is also the creator of the archive1018.mudam.lu website that was online from 2001 until 2009. He made a main contribution in giving a first virtual existence to the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.

Guili-guili vum Claude Closky aus der Mudam Sammlung an der Emissioun .art op RTL.

D'Wierk vum Claude Closky erkläert vun engem “Jeune Médiateur”.

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