POSSIBLES | PROBABLES

ABSTRACT

The exhibition project began with a simple question: how do you fill an empty white page until it becomes full and black? For each new attempt, each new chapter, rules are defined, some strict and regular, proportionality, randomness, surface division, Fibonacci sequence, and other more singular or arbitrary, unclassifiable ones.

Slowly, chapter after chapter, a lexicon is built up, potentially indexing all the possible ways of carrying out the assigned task. And the question could now be: is there an end to our imagination, to the possible? Infinity?

In this construct, the blank page can be understood as the starting point of any artistic work: a singularity. Here, it becomes both the object and the subject of the work: it is the framework that enables us to reflect on Art. The procedural nature of the work further challenges our capacity to translate any artistic gesture into written and formal rules, and as such puts Art and Language into relation.

The exhibition is divided into four walls, proper to LAb[au]’s artistic approach: painting, writing, calculating, and transcoding. Moving in between semiotics (sign) and aesthetics (form), the project is a continuation of their research. It can also be understood as an introspection, a way of looking at Art as a philosophical issue, a way of approaching its essence.

On eight tables, 160 graphic poems, all starting from the words ”possibles probables” generated from simple rules or from simple ChatGPT prompts, asking questions about the exhibition’s title, the process or Art history or comment on what might be considered nowadays the perfect application of statistics and probabilities, the most common answers to what are in fact, very complex questions.

This lexicon, this field of possibilities and probabilities, never finished and always completed, is just one step in a work that without repeating itself, has only one end and no end at the same time. On the walls of the Botanique, thousands of frames become an architecture of what exists and what might exist, showing only a tiny, but yet very large fragment of possibilities.