Daniel Blaufuks & Jean-Kenta Gauthier in conversation

Daniel Blaufuks & Jean-Kenta Gauthier
In conversation on 20 June 2022 as part of the exhibition

Daniel Blaufuks
The Days Are Numbered (January)

18 June - 3 September

at Jean-Kenta Gauthier / Odéon
5, rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie 75005 Paris

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The Days Are Numbered (January) is the second exhibition at the gallery of Daniel Blaufuks' (born in 1963, lives in Portugal) diary.

Since spring 2018, Daniel Blaufuks has been creating each day a meticulous composition of instant photographs and text on an A4 sheet of paper, before stamping a number on the front and writing the date on the back. Some days, he adds documents or objects. Entitled The Days Are Numbered, this vast project is like an imprecise diary recording events from the author's life, reflections on the world, literature and photography. Behind the melancholy punctuated by bouts of joy, anger, wonder and indignation, Daniel Blaufuks nurtures hope: by numbering each day, he counts the days that have passed and creates a kind of inverted countdown to his life.

The Days Are Numbered (January) focuses on items no. 241 to 271, which compose the diary for January 2019. This was the first time the author had written as a commentary on a day the very title of the series: "the days are numbered." (Sunday 6 January 2019). The Days Are Numbered has Daniel Blaufuks' obsessions as recurring visual motifs - photographs of two windows, flowers in his garden or rocks on the beach - and his words appear in the languages he uses in his life - Portuguese, German, English, French. The Days Are Numbered is like a lifeline for Daniel Blaufuks. By recording both the events and what separates them, The Days Are Numbered is the artist's counterpart to Attempting Exhaustion, his other large-scale project for which, since 2009, he has photographed his two windows, reiterating in photography Georges Perec's literary project in the text An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975), from which the title of the series is taken: "My purpose (...) has been to describe the rest: what one generally does not note, what is not noticed, what is not important: what happens when nothing happens, except time, people, cars and clouds." Because as Daniel Blaufuks says: we always photograph when something happens, never when nothing happens. What still happens then - that is the subject of Attempting Exhaustion.

The Days Are Numbered (January) also includes three works by Daniel Blaufuks which, in combination with his diary, put into perspective the questions of time, space and memory in the artist's work, and recall the role of literature in his practice.

With the precious support of Brice Garçon and \Else.



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