A House Without Rooms

A House Without Rooms
Organized by Guy Yanai

Linus Bill & Adrien Horni, Alistair Frost, Luc Fuller, Ridley Howard, Alex Katz, Guy Yanai

22.10.15 - 21.11.15



Its remarkable how often one hears it stubbornly that formalism is congenitally antipathetic to history. I myself have always tried to state the historical responsibility of forms. Thanks to linguistics and translinguistics, we will perhaps finally avoid the impasse to which sociology and history lead us: the improper reduction of history to the history of referents. There is a history of forms, structures, writings, which has its own particular time - or rather times: its precisely this plurality which seems threatening to some people.

Roland Barthes replying to a question regarding the ahistoricity of his formalism.
Does the sea have a door? Is there a house with no room? Are there words without letters?

These are some of the questions that my son Romy asks me. He has no idea how much his thinking influences me, a thinking that is not yet rooted in the limited possibilities that life inflicts on us, even the most poetic of us.
Houses without rooms, letters without words, yes, of course. Always. James Joyce took the furthest right? Finnegans Wake, an unreadable book that has stretched words and letters to the fullest. But words without letters? A form with no structure? Just the question as a thought is enough for me. Painting without marks of paint. Food without ingredients. Can this magic be made? Is this what Romy means? Is this what he wants to know? Can there be something made without the ingredients of that thing? Is this what our ultimate aim is? Who am I to say.

Is this is what painting now is? It has to be a form with no structure, a word without letters, letters without a word, two new words that make a third. The irreconcilable, the holding of opposing poles simultaneously. Painting now is free, and maybe in order to resonate, it has dissolve and hide its inner structure in order to regain it.

Here is a show of six artists in Paris who don’t use the Euro. Danish Krone, Swiss Franc, British Pound, Israeli Shekel, U.S Dollar. Maybe these artists make visible what resists visibility, maybe they make mistakes seem correct, maybe they live and work in a house without a room.


Guy Yanai



TORRI & Guy Yanai would like to thank Galerie Derouillon, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Galerie Allen, and Rod Barton Gallery for their help and generosity. And of course all of the artists.