Richard Baquié Constats d’échec

Richard Baquié is a crafter of improbable machines, gatherer of scrap iron, words, and dreams. In the early 1980s, he started developing ironic, facetious works, sometimes tinged with melancholy and founded on the notion of wandering and the “search for certainty”—a random, always sorry search that generates creative doubt. In 1991, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented the exhibition Constats d’échec, the first and only retrospective organized during the artist’s lifetime, a record of ten years of creation.
The catalog published for the occasion offers a timely review of this artist who died prematurely, adding theoretical and biographical material to the numerous photographs that illustrate it. Baquié recycled language as well as materials to craft and forge words and allow text to inhabit his sculptures.