Book presentation

For the past decade, Michel Tombroff has been exploring the links between the concepts of formalization, representation, and the real, particularly in the context of conceptual art, which emerged in the 1960s in the wake of abstraction and minimalism and played a fundamental role in the transition from the modern to the contemporary. His research from 2017 to 2024 culminated in his first essay, Zéro dièse existe – Art, mathématiques, inesthétique (Éditions Mimésis, 2024). That essay ended with a question: is it possible to imagine a “minimal” conceptual art that is not confused with so-called minimal art? In other words, what would happen if the concept contracted until it became that of almost nothing, or even nothing at all? What formalism could support this drastic requirement? What forms would result and what would they represent?

These questions led the author into a wide-ranging reflection on the concept of representation and the relationship to the real, from Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) to Céline Mathieu’s Oyster (2025), via Robert Smithson’s Non-site (Palisades-Edgewater, NJ) (1968), Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather (1996), and many others. Combined with the readings of Lacan and Badiou, this reflection revealed the existence of an impasse, the consequence of a misunderstanding. A crucial misunderstanding …

The presentation will be given in French.

Image: Céline Mathieu, Oyster (2025)
Photo courtesy Gauli Zitter