Suppose you open the bedroom door, because you need a little siesta.
Just to switch off the thinking and the senses for fifteen minutes.
Everything around you sleeps with you.
Works of art are packed and rest until they have to manifest themselves again to a viewer.
Receipts and other printed notes hang silently and harmlessly on the wall, and a cartoon character also takes a nap, while the titles of restful works of art lie, lean or hang here and there.
There are also books, and yes, they are about resting, sleeping, dreaming, but you cannot read them, because you sleep yourself; that’s okay, because you can’t open or browse them anyway.
Even the storage space is allowed to rest, as the packaged artworks have been moved into the bedroom.
Sifted light caresses through the room so as not to wake you from your slumber.
There are pillows and a little further on, the Goethe fountain is sleeping wrapped up near the place where once its water flowed.
Even the packaging of your lunch is lying dormant.
While you and everything around you in the room are in a private no man’s land, the rest of the world chirps, stumbles, mumbles, knocks and rustles steadily; sometimes you can still hear some vague fragments of it.
Alexandre Lavet (1988) is currently letting you experience it all at Dürst Britt & Mayhew under a title that cannot be pronounced, because the letters are also temporarily asleep.
Lavet himself is also represented at rest by his pyjamas and slippers, and of course throughout the installation, where even his humour sleeps in more and less inconspicuous tromp l’oeils.
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© Villa Next Door 2022
Contents of all photographs courtesy to Alexandre Lavet and Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Den Haag
Bertus Pieters
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