Richard BAQUIÉ (1952-1996)

EPSILON 1986

Richard Baquié – a hero of the Marseille scene from the 1980s-1990s, who departed too soon – is once again featured at La Friche de l’Escalette, where he assiduously frequented the former car scrapyard, in search of spare parts for his sculptures.

His complex work, despite its apparent DIY aesthetic, is eminently conceptual yet never dry or cold. It holds the poetry of Marseille, his hometown, its violence and its warmth, and uncovers hidden elements, childhood dreams, a poetic sensibility.

Translating the disillusionment of the 80s, Epsilon (1986), an installation composed of a charred R16 wreck – an icon of the family car and the industrial golden age of the Trente Glorieuses – faces Zéro, made up of four large letters cut from corrugated iron, echoing the title which approaches nothingness* and the inscriptions plastered on the sheet metal of a third wall element, consisting of a bright yellow car door, which read: Nothing, just the memory of light; while a large fan obstructing the door makes the sculpture vibrate with a cataclysmic sound.

This seminal work was exhibited in 1986 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the exhibition: Angles of Vision: French Art Today.

Epsilon can be described as a Neo-Futurist work, with its beams of letters forming a kind of comet tail for the car, which appears to be launched at full speed, a sensation reinforced by the wind and sound generated by the enormous fan.

This Neo-Futurist dimension, which Marinetti** and his friends would not have disavowed, embodied by the use of typography, movement, sound, light, cold… is crucial in several of Baquié’s works.

* Epsilon is the symbol that denotes an arbitrarily small, or even infinitely small, quantity.

** Marinetti is the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. This artistic and literary movement, born in Italy, rejects tradition and exalts machinery and speed. Its other founding members are the visual artists Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Severini, and Russolo.