Until Nothing Happens
Pierre Vialle, curator of the exhibition Jusqu’à ce que rien n’arrive à la Maison des Arts de Malakoff, brought together twenty artists including Pierre Alechinsky, Alberto Giacometti et José Johann Seinen - the gallery lent one of his work.
José Johann Seinen, born in the Netherlands in 1934, produced, with obsessive care, a unique body of work that could be compared to a personal mythology where archaeology and science fiction are intertwined. It is a spectacular project, one that also poses the question of the game in art. When his parents, suspected of collaborating with the Germans during the Occupation, were imprisoned at the end of the war, José and his five brothers were placed in the custody of their grandparents, who lived in Amsterdam. There, he began drawing tirelessly: exercise books designed like pop-up books filled with robots and – from the start – careful, minuscule cut-outs, small figures of a private theatre[…]