Book Description

The author, who always kept his distance from the avant-garde and from the literary movements of his times (because, in the words of Andre Breton, he was "fully determined to follow no inclination other than that of his spirit") reveals in the aforementioned text that he started out by inventing two phrases that were phonetically almost identical but had very different meanings, to later try to write a story that could start with one of them and end with the other. Using variations of this process he created his two most emblematic works, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa, which give this exhibition its name. The show analyses the influence that Raymond Roussel has had on modern and contemporary art, by looking at a broad array of works in a variety of formats (paintings, photos, sculptures, ready-mades, installations, videos...) by about thirty different artists.