Joël Ducorroy • WI Intimité

In 1980, he met Serge Gainsbourg and engaged with him in a verbal playfulness. “Et cætera c’est adéquat” (“And so on is adequate”). In a department store—the same one where Marcel Duchamp bought his bottle rack—he decided to inscribe this phrase on license plates, in order to commemorate the event. From 1981 onward, he adopted the license plate as a medium: it is quick to produce, and the artist has nothing to do except place the order by telephone directly with the manufacturer. He produced several works in a spirit close to Pop artists.

The plates each designate a part of a larger object, which, when assembled end to end, recomposes the shape of that object. In 1985, he exhibited in New York for the first time, at the Emily Harvey Gallery, which primarily supports artists of the Fluxus movement. The following year in Paris, he presented his work at Galerie Polaris. Joël Ducorroy returned to New York in 1987 for a new solo exhibition and on that occasion met Andy Warhol. He became acquainted with artists from Nice and took part in several group shows. A major exhibition was dedicated to him at the Galerie d’Art Contemporain of the Nice Museums.

The Tokyo Museum of Modern Art invited him in 1989 to participate in the exhibition Color or Monochrome. Joël Ducorroy regularly took part in evenings of sound poetry at the Revue Parlée of the Centre Pompidou, presented by Blaise Gauthier. He adopted the designation of “plate artist” (artiste plaquetien), a term suggested to him by Jean-Claude Lande, a friend of Raymond Hains. He met Marcel Mariën, the Belgian Surrealist artist, and each stay in Brussels became an opportunity for him to visit him. In 1991, nine galleries came together to celebrate ten years of his work. At the end of 1992, the Confort Moderne in Poitiers gave him the opportunity to realize a major work: he composed the interior of an F4-type apartment entirely out of license plates. More than a thousand plates were required to produce this work.

A reader of Gide, Bukowski, and Burroughs, Joël Ducorroy, as a collector of words, plays with art. He is described as a neo-conceptual humorist. He has found a “trick”—the trick is style—for which one only needs to know how to read in order to understand. Like one of his masters, Rodchenko, he applies his ideas across different fields such as architecture, textile design, and photography.

Joël Ducorroy