Galerie Lara Vincy.

Born in 1964 in Chartres, France.
Works and lives in Pantin, France.
revueoxo.blogspot.com

 

“Pascal Le Coq’s approach takes its source in his OXO project of an encyclopedic magazine: the publication appears like a core from which spring forth numerous proposals, capable of being embodied in the shape of tridimensional undertakings, as well as multiplying on the numerical pages of a blog, before re-integrating their first space, simultaneously tangible and virtual.”
Marie Boivent, “Revues d’artistes : une introduction”, Revue 2-0-1
www.revue-2-0-1.net/index.php?/revuesdartistes/revues-dartistes/

 

For nearly twenty years, Pascal Le Coq has revolutionized the  encyclopedic approach by means of a protean body of work called OXO.
Simultaneously a review, a dictionary, a virtual object and a tridimensional object, it acts like an extractor absorbing the icons of the media world to provide new artistic forms.
The publication, created in 1996, has endured many vagaries, that bring it closer to an organism in mutation than to a classic magazine. The only invariable criteria: its A5 size and its fidelity to the “Principle of variability”: the number of pages, the manufacturing technique and the printing are directly tied into the number of subscribers. A minimal guarantee of survival, whereas many publications are undergoing often fatal financial constraints. The complete collection of the issues can be consulted in the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the Centre Pompidou (Paris), in the Centre des livres d’artistes (Saint-Yrieix) or in the Cabinet du livre d’artiste (Rennes).
The accumulation of editorial contents led in 2004, to the first version of the DDictionnaire OXO, a  double dictionary dealing at first with the economy set out in that experiment, then with the contents that can be transformed into material art works. Pascal Le Coq has appropriated the system described by Jorge Luis Borges in the short story Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius: that of an imaginary encyclopedia whose objects end up replacing the real world.
And so, numerous definitions, first shown in the pages of OXO, have been “transmuted” into tridimensional works and exhibited since 2004 in the galerie Lara Vincy and in other public spaces such as Fiac (2005), the Musée royal de Mariemont in Belgium (2007) and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (2009): “Miss Erotica” (sport balls turned inside out like socks and showing a glimpse of their bladder in erection), “Lubies” (reconstituted flags in the manner of “LUxembourg + zamBIE = LUBIE”), “Les filles de Léonard” (a gallery of 60 portraits of male artists dressed up as women) or else “Testosterone” (giant parodies of Toblerone packs).
Within a revisited Duchampian approach (“It is the viewer who makes the work”), Pascal Le Coq is determined to provide works with several layers of visibility. No instructions leaflet, no semantic explanations, but essentially technical and descriptive definitions. However, the latter does admit that the genuine function of these objects is to illustrate the numerous mutations that occur within OXO. We will be able to confirm it with the next version of the DDictionnaire, that will provide over 4888 notices ready to come to life elsewhere than in a book.

Group shows (selected):