HUGO KRIEGEL
HORLOGE 1440 - L'ÉCONOMIE DU TEMPS LIBRE
March 27 - April 15, 2023 Exhibition curator: Yann Toma Vernissage March 27, 2023 Sorbonne Artgallery is pleased to present Hugo Kriegel's series HORLOGE 1440 - L'ÉCONOMIE DU TEMPS LIBRE, on view from March 27 to April 15, 2023.
Dichotomy between free time and working time
If there are occasional doubts about the size of this project and the uncertainty of finishing it, it is by no means a waste of time. Hugo Kriegel, working exclusively in his free time, marks the dichotomy between free time and working time. This lifelong vision is all the more interesting as it perfectly embodies the artist's research theme. Here, the notion of work is intrinsically linked to the idea of production and remuneration. Free time, on the other hand, embodies for all of us the moment when we are allowed to act as we please, for our own well-being, without any notion of money. However, the boundary between free time and working time is not a binary separation, and seems to blur as the artist's site-specific interventions unfold. Hugo Kriegel thus questions the proportion and meaning of the time allotted to our lives, which brings us back to our own alienation from time.
The economy of free time Kriegel's work focuses particularly on the notion of the economy of free time, along two main lines: there are always costs behind free time, and there can be no pointless expenditure of time, because the value of effort is never in vain. While there is no question of remuneration in free time, this artistic work contrasts a humanistic dimension with the legal framework that governs the city. Thanks to the active participation of passers-by or participants in the work of art (accommodation, moral and financial support, suggestions of venues, etc.), Kriegel puts forward Bourriaud's idea of "relational aesthetics", according to which art should not simply be a visual or aesthetic experience, but rather a social experience that directly engages the participant. Thus, by pooling everyone's efforts in this project, the artist produces a veritable system that generates a value, a human symbolism.
However, the project's philosophy sometimes comes up against the harshness of arrests, resulting in the truly exceptional expense of fines and, above all, the loss of precious minutes turned into hours.
Time is an energy, a resource that is constantly disappearing and unrecoverable. Above all, we remember it, which means that time is a fundamental part of our life experience. It is therefore important to spend it in a meaningful way. Thus, the economy of free time, as experienced and proposed by Kriegel, encourages the viewer to spend time in the best possible way, instilling in it a precious value that the artist attempts to immortalize through his colossal and inspiring project: Clock 1440.
Visual artist Lives and works in Paris. A 2011 graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Paris 1 Sorbonne, he has built a series of works around the 3 themes of Time, Money and Value. The question of Work in relation to these 3 notions is at the heart of the artist's work. A long-time resident of places such as New York, La Réunion and Seoul, he has nourished his thinking by confronting various cultures, and in particular their relationship to Time. The synthesis of this research is by definition incomplete, the notion of leisure hypothetical and the use of work subjective, and Hugo Kriegel still has many time zones to cross. Documentary on artist Hugo Kriegel's Clock 1440 project. Trajectoire 1440 - film in progress https://vimeo.com/379595604/80e7daebfa Photography: Samuel Fleury and Hugo Kriegel Editing: Samuel Fleury
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