M HKA Ensembles

Book, 23 x 17 cm, 192 p, language: French, publisher: art&fiction, Lausanne, ISBN: 978-2-940377-60-2.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2026/261).

Literary synopsis

Sans Titre is a novel, or more precisely a story in the style of many contemporary biographies, such as "My life is so exciting" or "All about me"... These are the memories of a work of art, a masterpiece of twenty-first century. Discovering it has a gift for speech, this artwork of the Musée du Nouveau Louvre collection decided to tell his story to a visitor, to correct the official versions that seem too far from reality. This is the first novel by Hubert Renard, more accustomed to making images than writing literature. It attempts to describe the making of art, but also to invent, through the innocence of an imaginary voice, a way of telling the workings of the cultural system, by avoiding the structural analyses which were already made. It comes to seek, through the voice of this fictional object, where the mystery of art hides. Difficult to determine - but is it important? - if this is an artist’s book or a literary work...

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Hubert Renard creates his own probable artistic career, gathering a documentation of exhibition views, newspaper articles, press kits, etc... These archives tell the perfect work, initiated in the 1970s, of an artist named Hubert Renard, and they are shown as documents in display cases. One can discover his artwork in books that look like exhibition catalogs, in which the artist has all compound: illustrations, critical text, design and curriculum vitae. His work about writing, such as articles with jargon emphasized, or many texts by Alain Farfall, an art critic invented to comment his work, brought him to envisage a more literary approach, which took shape in his novel Sans Titre.