MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is delighted to conclude this first year in Paris with its first presentation of a work by John Armleder.

- “I have always believed that a show using artworks- existing ones or not- creates another artwork, which is separate from the artworks themselves and is a new one.”

- “As you know, I am also fascinated about decoration, Christmas decorations and all that stuff. Glitter has always existed in art since as long as we can think, in one form or another like mosaic mirrors.”

- “My work is a cultural fact, an inevitable fact. If artists disappeared, art would be produced by others, with different consciousness, means and materials. The individual artist fulfills just a box. He is an instrument so that this establishment, this accumulation of facts can organize themselves. In fact, I had two goals in this prospect that were lost on their own. The first would have been not to recognize my work. I have unfortunately not arrived yet to enter a museum and not recognize one of my pieces. And for the second, ideally I would have wanted to do only one thing.”

- “My mother went to Hawaii when I was a kid and brought me back a Hawaiian shirt, which maybe changed my life!”

- “The juxtaposition of real and fake has always interested me. Because we produce life in one way or another, or picture it, and the origin of the image sometimes decays.”

- “I always have a problem when people fashion the fact that they are clever. They stage the fact that they are clever. I think this sophistication is very attractive. It’s aesthetically very impressive but in a way that bugs me.”

- “The message doesn’t exist. Art never said anything: it has always been a platform that people can use to say things if they want, but art itself is mute, all art is mute.”

- “When I see art which has nothing to do with what I do and I would never do, I nevertheless think that it’s something I could have done.”

- “One can imagine that all the apples that Cézanne painted are no longer on this planet, maybe they have been eaten, maybe by him.”

- “In a way a genius architect like Frank Lloyd Wright did everything wrong in terms of installing artworks and it’s somehow successful. I have very good memories of most of the shows I saw at the Guggenheim and in a way it’s the worst technical museum you can imagine. The good thing about this kind of museum- this is what I always tell my son who is a skateboarder- is that they are the best museums in the world for skateboarding. The sad thing is that they don’t let anyone skate…”

- “What you do is simply something that was bound to happen when you do it.”

- “At one point we decided that an artist should be a guy who doesn’t fit. If he fits perfectly, there are no consequences. I think that’s totally wrong. In fact, you cannot not fit. The more you don’t fit, the more the world of art will crosstalk, and it would mean that you fit again. The more you break the mold the more the mold is there in a way. Isn’t it a parody of life, perhaps?”