Didier Rittener is concerned with memory, collective memory (multiple images from scholarly or popular books) and individual memory linked to personal selection - made from ibis multiplicity of images. This is how Didier Rittener, in a singular and unique way, chooses to make “collages” from different images. His original drawings or his transfers deal with our own memory faced with accumulation and representation. Alongside these drawings, Didier Rittener makes geometrical sculptures using the same play on associations and selection by accentuating a symbolical representation of our Western society.

Didier Rittener in his work in general, and perhaps more especially in desert me, is concerned with various sensory, intellectual or physical apprehensions one might experience during an exhibition and the intensity of existing paradoxes between representation and reality. For example, Didier Rittener has created an entirely new piece of work here, a (black) square “spiral” that seems to relate to nature and time, which can be read both as a “functional”, architectural clement and as an “archaeological” one. His form creates doubt between function and representation; in this it resembles various sculptures already made by Didier Rittener, but its scale (9,50m long) modifies our relationship to “the object” and brings an additional degree of reality even if the absorbent and malt black of the «spiral» is just too dark to be true! This colour, resembling ash, recalls the graphite used by the artist for his drawings, but also evokes the idea of ruin: “desert me”. Like the “spiral”, the six inordinately large stars situated in the second room are basic forms. Gypsum flowers, viruses or objects for protecting frontiers, these abstract forms entitled “self-protection” saturate the space that accommodates them.

Alongside the sculptures, Didier Rittener presents three large transfer drawings under glass. Desert me is the third stage in an exhibition programme the artist has undertaken over the past two years.

Claire Le Restif