Thierry Davila's 'De l'inframince' Traces Art of Tenuity from Duchamp to Orozco

Thierry Davila's book 'De l'inframince', published by Éditions du Regard, offers a history of tenuity in art, focusing on Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin and its legacy in contemporary practices. The study devotes significant attention to Duchamp, using rigorous scientific apparatus to position the work centrally in recent art history. Davila expands his inquiry to general notions of tenuity, examining historiographical concepts and specific case studies from contemporary production. He identifies an artistic lineage fascinated by extreme delicacy, tracing it back to antiquity's admiration for Apelles' imperceptible lines. Duchamp transforms the nature of the infinitesimal, shifting from delicate gesture to tenuity of intervention. This is explored in works like Gabriel Orozco's 'Home Run' (1993), where MoMA neighbors place an orange on a glass of water in their windows. Carl Andre summarizes such works as 'art that is invisible if you don't look for it.' Artists abandon the pencil for minimal, ephemeral, never explicit events, relying on expectation and disappointment. The artwork becomes a theater of nothing, a performance of intimacy creating space and time for adaptation to the infrathin.