Claude Closky b. 1963
Flow (2002-2004)
Claude Closky, ‘Flow,’ 2002-2004, art-netart, Paris. Video, silent. Coproduction art-netart, Noël Solutions, realisation Sandrine Rivière, unlimited duration.

Claude Closky’s 2000s work clings to the hyper-consumption of signs, and particularly advertising signs, among which one will easily include the graphic vocabulary of economics, in so far as one agrees to accept that its significance, its capacity of effective representation of a reality, fades away behind a diverting abstraction, which produces a tapestry effect. Closky upgrades these signs by taking into account only the stating of meaning, and its function overwhelming reality, cancelling any message in favour of a decorative reason, whose infinite variations produce only one tireless reproduction of same. flux uses in a simplified way, reduced with the logotypic sweetening of forms inherited from a modernistic geometric abstraction (circle and line), one of the characteristic patterns of contemporary economics, consisting in representing displacements, material and immaterial, between masses. In extracting these fluxes from any intention and any context, Closky makes their movements intransitive until absurdity, but also shows how they raise to value, without it being interrogated nor called in question, concepts of mobility, adaptability, flexibility... Beyond the smooth surface of the spheres and vectors, beyond the fluidity of their quiet animation, the violence of a reality cleverly cleared of these invariably positivist representations is revealed: the violence of the obliteration of the possible causes and consequences of these exchanges.

François Piron, March 2004