Exhibition

  • The World Upside-Down
    François Dallegret
    Artist
    François Dallegret and Francois Perrin
    Curators
    WUHO Gallery, Woodbury University, Los Angeles
    May 19, 2016 to Jun 26, 2016
  • GRANTEE
    François Dallegret
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

François Dallegret, Palais Métro, 1967, Montréal, Canada. Courtesy of the artist.

The World Upside-Down presents Villa Ironique, one of François Dallegret's projects in his ongoing series of takes on residential architecture. Dallegret’s work often produces multi-layered answers to insolvable questions of the contemporary world, and here the irony stages the ultimate nonchalant triangulation to excrete an appropriate “minimum vital”—a silly silo conceived to procreate instantly, unlike any other device on earth, out of any bit and piece falling straight from outer space. An India ink drawing on acetate, Villa Ironique is the first of The World Upside-Down series, and views the concept of the detached home from a "modern" perspective, in which the residential function is expressed as a symbol of the technical—in other words, "the dream of a flawless performance, of guaranteed essentials."

Trained as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, François Dallegret has been attracted to operational design since 1964, inspired both by the plastic and technological arts. His recent public arts projects in France, Porte-Lumière (2001), Traffic (2009), and DrapoLum (2010–18), constitute the achievement of an exploratory process at the edge of both the tangible and intangible worlds. His conceptual tools, including fluorescence and standard factory-made components, have evolved, along with his bi-dimensional approach, but his goals and aims are always the same.