Julien Audebert's Microscopic Utopias at Galerie Art: Concept

Julien Audebert's exhibition at Galerie Art: Concept in Paris (March 15–May 17, 2008) explores the paradox of undermining visual supremacy through conceptual art. Audebert retypes canonical texts—from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Jules Verne's Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum, and works by Francis Bacon and Charles Fourier—in microscopic font, printing each entire book on a single page. The resulting dense, illegible blocks challenge the viewer's experience of text and image. The show also features a large photographic print deconstructing the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, reassembling multiple frames into a single tableau. A transcription of Homer's Odyssey on 35mm film was later presented at Art Basel. The work engages with conceptual art's debt to Mallarmé and echoes practices by Kosuth and Gonzalez-Torres, while critiquing contemporary digital utopianism.