Beyond the personal history that binds me to this artist, I would like to honor the work of Jean-Luc Meyer Abbatucci who stands out among many of his contemporaries, as a true outsider of the production and promotion system of the art world today. The essential questions that he continually asks himself are those of identity, nomadism, nationality, borders and their limits. It is a quest that is enriched over the years and the travels where Jean-Luc Meyer Abbatucci sets out to discover men, far from the social events and privileged circles of large international cities, and crosses more borders, meets more natives and indigenous people, than museums have opened their doors to him for an exhibition.

A graduate of the Beaux Arts de Paris and endowed with a scholarship from Parsons School NYC, Jean-Luc Meyer Abbatucci was born in Brazzaville, Congo in 1956 and his CV simply describes the list of his travels and the pieces on his journey.

A nomadic work, which is born from a childhood in Africa, from a relationship with the earth, the carnal and nature. He leaves Africa and arrives in France in 1970 where he finds himself brutally uprooted in Saint Cloud in the suburbs of Paris, but he returns to the land of his ancestors with the nonchalance and the spirit of storyteller specific to Africa. He continues his encounter with the colonized, the expatriates, the refugees from the world at war, and the tribes who have managed to survive there and remain in struggle. His work is later stimulated by the awareness of new technologies and the ecological and economic drifts of countries, and is expressed by a work of Land Art photographed by NASA in 1995. The meeting with Hugo Hebreard in 2001 and their collaboration which begins in 2005 to form the collective named Orobouros (the snake that bites its tail). Then continues the denunciation and action against pollution with in situ works-manifestations built of materials and plastic bottles participating in the cleaning and recycling of pollutants of the oceans, the first pieces are made in 2006.

With this exhibition, Outcasts Incorporated continues to question the limits of art, production, collection. The goal is also to push the boundaries of the exhibition of plastic works in the direction of the commitments and strong values ​​that motivate us: here we present a selection of the flagship works of this artist as well as his recent works.

– A nominative and photographic directory from his meetings with refugees. In Lesbos, Greece this month, where he goes to meet and give a name to all these unknown people, refugees from the deadly and devastating terror of ISIS. As we read the names of the war memorials, here we read the names of the survivors, before they resume their exodus, from Lesbos to Turkey, then Europe pushes them back into the unknown.

– Two large-format canvases, military tarpaulins coated with pigments, earth, sand and map collages, from his travels in Kurdistan and Pakistan.

– Photographic traces, scans and documents of an ephemeral installation in the desert, correspondence with the Jordanian and Israeli governments and photos taken by a NASA astronaut during the COLUMBIA STS 73 Mission.

– Numerous notebooks and books made “on the road”, between India and Nepal, Colombia, Chile and Spain, on recycled found books, magazine pages, cut and glued back together as if in response to the limits of nomadic creation, and acts of overproduction and overconsumption ambient in artistic creation. As in Arte Povera, everything is recycled. A series of books containing family secrets have been immersed in water, buried, exposed to the sun, leaving an indelible mark on a barely concealed story, in the drawers of memory: The Hidden Book, The Dead Words, The Drowned Book, The Book on the Beach, The Refugees Signed, Frontier, The Broken Book, No Borders, The Closed Book.

Through this exhibition, Outcasts Incorporated also aims to demonstrate that the artist is not only that of museums and the antechambers of cultural institutions, but the active and sensitive man who expresses himself through inseparable plastic and life work. Here, the form is brutal, the content is sensitive. We also question the role of the contemporary artist in a world that is becoming dehumanized and disintegrating in a race for status and power. I like to remember this sentence from Bruce Nauman: “The true Artists help the world by revealing mystical truths.” The Artist as the Committed Man is also what is cruelly lacking in art today: men, in all their Humanity.

Géraldine Postel