About

“What does La Surface de l’Art (The Surface of Art) refer to? To the century old dust that has been removed, which now reveals the true appearance of the place where we hope that art will appear? Or does this act mean that we must go beyond the facade of the edifice, that we must enter an art centre if we want to see art? As with everything, perhaps one has to look beneath the surface, to get under the skin, in order to perceive the essence. But is one really guaranteed to see art when entering? Is the building enough to identify everything within it as belonging to art? […] The main thing is not to content oneself with the surface of art: we have to dust off our minds as well as the work in order to arrive at what really counts.”

– Speech by Enrico Lunghi, artistic director (1996–2008), during the opening of the exhibition Jacques Charlier – La Surface de l’Art, 5 June 1997.

Jacques Charlier (*1939, Liège, Belgium; lives and works in Liège) is a many-faceted artist who does paintings, graphic novels, video, and photography. His offbeat approach brings a witty and self-mocking perspective to the art scene.

“This was supposed to be a very wise and relatively profound thought in a circle that was planned in my head to appear in the most natural way as soon as I would have started writing it on this very ceiling, but it seems that this beautiful idea doesn’t really work. Sorry.” – Nedko Solakov

Nedko Solakov
(*1957, Cherven Briag, Bulgaria; lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria) is a storyteller. His works deal with the position of the artist and his work within society. He comments his thoughts and reflexions through short handwritten texts or drawings put directly on exhibition walls.

In December 2012 Casino Luxembourg invited five international artists to take part in a competition with the purpose of creating a permanent artistic design for the north facade of the building in the Rue Notre-Dame. The jury’s unanimous decision was in favour of the project Beautiful Steps #10 by the Swiss artist duo Lang/Baumann. In May 2014, Lang/Baumann installed a balcony in the form of a frustum, or truncated pyramid, in the middle of the building’s northern facade, the aim being to trigger a dialogue between the interior and exterior space. The balcony, three metres tall and made from white-painted glass fibre laminate, appears from the outside to be a closed geometrical form, a large architectural protuberance into empty space. Only from inside the building, on the first-floor landing, does one realise that this “balcony” actually can be used for its intended purpose.

Beautiful Steps #10 is part of the Beautiful Steps series Sabina Lang (*1972; lives and works in Burgdorf, Switzerland) and Daniel Baumann (*1967; lives and works in Burgdorf, Switzerland) have been working on for several years; the series deals with an original and extraordinary exploration of the definitions, forms and functions of stairs. 

Financial support: Les Amis des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire Luxembourg

With her lighted neon work, Zeitgeist: Karl Cobain, Claudia Passeri has added a hint of history to the restaurant on Casino’s ground-floor. It is composed of two soundwaves, one being a transcription of the opening line of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the other being a line sung by Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, in the group’s cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. This piece thereby links two remote periods and ideologies that are nevertheless related to Casino Luxembourg’s own history: Casino Bourgeois was founded in the days of Karl Marx while the Forum d’art contemporain was launched two years after Kurt Cobain’s death.

Claudia Passeri
(*1977; lives and works in Luxembourg and Perugia, Italy) creates site-specific interventions and contextual pieces that explore human perception in relation to place. Depending on the site and the context, the work takes on social, political, and environmental aspects. Her research has a neo-Romantic aspect that seeks, frequently via the use of irony, to reveal the mechanisms that activate the human creative processes, which transform how we view the world.

The installation Zäit Wuert (Luxembourgish for Time/Word) consists of a six-letter illuminated sign mounted on the Casino facade on boulevard Roosevelt. The displayed words depend on a process that randomly generates six letters while verifying each combination in German, English, French and Luxembourgish dictionaries. If no word is found, the process starts all over again. Each query takes a different time, which in turn defines the duration of the word’s display. Based on a chance operation, the installation replaces the sign’s original six letters: c-a-s-i-n-o. This writing process supplants traditional narration with the polysemy of an agnostic statement, a concrete poetry that encourages interpretation and association.

LAb[au] is composed of Manuel Abendroth, Jérôme Decock and Els Vermang, based in Brussels, Belgium. In their practice, the artists investigate the relation between art and language not only by means of written words and other forms of coded language, semantics, but also through signs, or semiotics. Likewise, they take a linguistic approach, employing information and communication science in the field of art.