Pascal Le Coq

Born in 1964 in Chartres, France.
Works and lives in Pantin, France.
“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
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.