In Arc-et-Senans lies the gates to the underworld, a semicircular fragment of a parallel reality, an alchemical symbol, a tinderbox of revolution, a pastoral factory, a time crystal, or a prescient example of an artist defining an aesthetics of work.
Dennis Goodwin
Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographic work The dark intestine of Nicolas Ledoux is a sideways approach towards the French revolutionary architect’s oeuvre.
Revolving around the Saline Royale, his hybrid factory - part panopticon, part anticipated ruin - Blees Luxemburg exhibits nocturnal chimera of the imperfect Utopia.
Ledoux’s interest in the eye, the organ of visual pleasure as well as of surveillance, anticipated photography and its double-agency.
Factory, 2019
30x36cm
Portal, 2019
124x115.5cm
Panoptical Sublime, 2019
155 x 124cm
The Dark Intestine of Nicolas Ledoux, 2019
146x115cm
Night Guard, 2019
50.5 x 40.1 cm
During the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, the architect Nicolas Ledoux was forced to abandon the completion of his half-built city, Chaux - its celestial spheres, secluded orbs and phallic pleasure house never to be realised. Yet the Saline Royale, a hybrid factory - part panopticon, part ornamental ruin – had been built. Could Ledoux ever have anticipated that his outlandish Saline would become the blueprint for the future of work itself, albeit sans ornament?
This work is inspired by the disobedient habits of the Saline's nightguard.
