FORSCHUNGEN: Raphaël Denis

Low visibility

Organized looting, as an act of violence and dispossession, implies a form of logistical sophistication from which Raphaël Denis’s work reveals the brutality. Paintings redacted, works and images impeded, objects reduced to their transport device or inventory number, dizzying bureaucratic documentations narrating the fate of goods seized by force before being hastily piled up, listed, crated, conveyed, dispersed, sold or annihilated: each new process elaborated by the artist is a way of making tangible the chaos of the life of things. The works of art concerned here thus exist only through the display of their metadata, and see their existence cruelly confined to the back of their own postcard - an object whose very nature is here taken in reverse. These constant games of inversion, in which containers dominate contents and labels the works they indicate, are one of the main features of the artist’s projects. They capture a long-term reflection on institutional silences, on art and the opacity of history, as well as the moral interferences that disrupt our relationship with beauty.

The “Aulnay train” episode is the starting point for the installation La Loi normale des erreurs : Valeurs ajoutées. Knowledge of the facts owes to the work of Rose Valland, a curator at the Musée du Jeu de Paume at the time when the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) was centralizing looted objects there, prior to their distribution, sale or destruction. In August 1944, as Allied troops advanced at high speed towards the capital, a remnant of surviving furniture and works of art, some of them deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis, were loaded onto trucks bound for the Aubervilliers railway station, then crated before being loaded onto the carriages of a train bound for Nikolsburg Castle in Moravia. Secretly documenting all the steps taken by the occupying forces, Rose Valland notified her superior Jacques Jaujard, director of the Musées nationaux and a member of the Samson network, of the imminent move. Warned, the Resistance set to sabotaging the operation. The train was immobilized for a time in Aubervilliers, then transported to Le Bourget, in a profitable context of debacle and saturation of the rail network. On August 27, 1944, alerted by the SNCF of the Nazi administration’s renewed efforts to speed up the convoy’s departure, the Leclerc Army intercepted it at Aulnay-sous-Bois. Rose Valland wrote in her notebook: “The wagons were left with 148 crates of works of art”.

While the hundred or so crates of train no. 40.044 contained a number of works by today’s most celebrated modern and avant-garde artists, Raphaël Denis’s work and its documentation establish an alternative narrative to that of the legendary “museum train”, popularized in particular by the spectacular feature film The Train (1964). Alongside a few prominent names, there was in fact a number of second-rate artists, whose surviving works stood alongside countless lesser-valued objects seized by the Occupiers (bedsprings, chests of drawers, sewing machines, sugar bowls...). The prestige attributed to these 148 boxes also helped to conceal the reality of a train whose silent majority of carriages - a total of about fifty - had been loaded with furniture looted from Parisian apartments by the German Möbel-Aktion. As for the last convoy of deportees, it left Drancy on August 17, 1944 and reached its intended destinations: Buchenwald, Ravensbrück. On board were 1,301 human lives.

It is precisely what we are left with (to reiterate Rose Valland’s words), or rather what eludes us from the episode of the “Aulnay train” that Raphaël Denis stages in Forschungen. This multi-faceted exhibition reactivates a vocabulary with which the artist has familiarized us. This includes the meticulous transcription of archives (in this case, the inventory of works drawn up at the time of their recovery), or a batch of transport crates made on a reduced scale in charcoal black. Together, these elements retrace the story in all its dimensions, crossing material and human destinies. 

Alongside the fictitiously recomposed contents of the freight cars, the display rack and different rows of postcards from La Loi normale des erreurs : Cartels are the artist’s way of reifying images. Objects of intimacy, of transit and of vacancy, these cards all feature on their reverse side paintings looted by the Nazis, returned after the Liberation and now displayed on the walls of various museums around the world. Among them are documented dozens of objects taken aboard the “Aulnay train” in the summer of 1944. By flanking their noble sides with the inventory numbers that have been temporarily assigned to the works and which often bear their owner’s patronymic marks, Raphaël Denis unsettles our perception of aesthetic value: the device encourages us to reevaluate what, in the museum, deserves to be exhibited.

The exploration of all these themes continues with the Black Hi-Vis, a new series of works made from “high-visibility” reflective textiles mounted on a frame, and divided according to an elementary geometry. Stubbornly flat, deceptively aesthetic, these works in no way signal any kind of autonomist return to the easel painting. In the broader context of their creation, they too are imbued with volume, if not gravity: that of the fabric, sagging under its own weight and over which the pigments are spread; that of their leaden color and its nuances, drawing disturbing draperies. The Black Hi-Vis reflect Raphaël Denis’ meticulous attention to detail in the carpentry of his pieces, as well as his inflexible attachment to the notions of veiling and unveiling, to which the chosen motif is tied. Viewed from an angle, these trompe-l’œil pieces evoke the tarpaulins of lorries carrying confidential merchandise, encountered on the outskirts of cities during a nocturnal wander. It is in clandestinity, then, that we return to the image, which, barely revealed, nevertheless plays the role of its own mask. Resolutely dark, the matter to Raphaël Denis is no less reflective.

Victor Claass