JULIAN PREVIEUX::::
born in 1974, Grenoble, France
works in Paris

Prévieux deals with the world’s corporate manipulation of social organization. In Lettres de non-motivation, which has been unrelentingly conducted for several years, the artist responds in the negative to job offers gathered from the press. The lack of “motivation,” reasserted on a daily basis, thus becomes a full-time job. Each missive is the pretext for a different stylistic exercise which, by its often tragi-comic dimension, stigmatizes the kafkaesque absurdity inherent in this type of ritual. From Bartleby to the elderly, from the paranoid applicant to the overbooked, the author plays a host of roles in order to vehemently increase the number of arguments for his refusal. The answers sent by companies are all evidence of an impossible communication whereby the entire hiring system is seen to be faulty.

A la recherche du miracle économique is a triptych made up of three drawings. in the center of each panel is an excerpt from volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital. The border or outer rim is covered with an amorphous grouping of key words spotted in Marx’s text. The system of deciphering used to highlight these key words goes back to the biblical code. In the middle Ages, monks used this code to reveal the secret meanings in sacred texts. The decoding technique shows hidden terms according to equidistant series of letters; words are laid bare by choosing a starting letter and then leaving out the same number of letters each time. The words are linked together by arrows suggesting relationships of cause and effect, and membership. this network of lines forms a graph, which Prévieux uses to chart the twists and turns of financial scandals and economic crises. In the first panel, the text written in 1867 predicts the Great depression. The dates, facts, and sometimes even the names of the people involved in the slump can be found. The second drawing brings together terms having to do with the very recent enron scandal, symbol of today’s malfunctions and of deregulation taken to the extreme. The people running the company, the politicians implicated in the affair, and a whole set of terms concerning the failure of the company are found in the same way. The third and last element of the triptych depicts a future event: a widespread fall combining the development of an informal economy and the failure of the classic monetary system. Under these conditions, the search for the economic miracle looks to be pretty tough—the oracle tells of nothing but a series of catastrophes, a chaotic picture of years gone by and of years to come. The events presented are so many icons of capitalism’s spectacular failures.