[Parblex! is an outdoor based and shortened version of Parbleu! created in 2019]

 

It has been almost twenty years that they’ve been pulling at the blanket with a complicity that is more and more natural with every passing year. Their love of a good joke is without compromise. Year after year, Jean-Paul Lefeuvre and Didier André reaffirm their language: a form of craftwork that is both modest and laborious, giving them center ring in their own particular sort of “slow circus”.

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This new show aspires towards a minimalism that gives precedence to this brand of craftwork. Working to the bone each and every one of the props they found in the back of the shed (a board, a shovel, a sledgehammer…), they transform these everyday items with their ever-meticulous dexterity. In their careful hands, these objects are made to move, given a life, a soul and at times go even further, by becoming actual partners or, once in a while, stealing the limelight.

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The circle is no longer the shape these artists evolve in. Now their exploits take place in a rectangle, one that looks like a petanque ground or a tennis court or a giant pool table… In any case the rules stay the same, and are the sacred rules of the sandpit: any and all fantasy is welcome but must be applied with care. Taking themselves far without taking themselves seriously, that is the hardest task of all.

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Stripped of artifice, economical in motion, these two create a world of their own in which the useless argues happily with the paltry, and the absurd stretches to a laugh. Until, at the end, poetry appears as the common denominator of all those efforts in vain...