Sentences written in French using neon tubing are suspended along the walls of the medieval Louvre. Joseph Kosuth, a major figure of the contemporary international art scene, temporarily lays claim to the excavated ancient Louvre, offering visitors a dense and luminous work.

The influential American artist Joseph Kosuth is widely regarded as a leading proponent, and one of the founders, of conceptual art, a movement which emerged in New York in the 1960s. His work considers art to be the production of meaning and thus the idea, or concept, becomes the defining component of a work of art, often eliminating the materiality of the art object altogether.

Since the mid-1960’s, Kosuth’s work has focused on the connections between words and things, between language and representation. As his work is conceptually based and not media defined, he employs various strategies for his work, from photos with common objects or neon tubing (Centre Pompidou Collection) to texts sandblasted in stone (Champollion Monument, Places des Écritures, Figeac). Kosuth create installations with texts, often monumental in size, usually comprised of quotations from different sources: literature, philosophy, anthropology, among others. His public works, as well as works in most public and private collections, can be found in most countries in Europe, The United States and Japan and elsewhere. Joseph Kosuth’s most recent installations include a project on the Isola di San Lazzaro for the Venice Biennale in 2007 and another at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2008.

This time, the artist has decided to work in the moats of the medieval Louvre and to write on the old walls of the medieval palace, encouraging the visitor to rediscover this mysterious, underground space.

The title of this installation, "Neither Appearance nor Illusion" ("ni apparence ni illusion") is taken from a quote of Friedrich Nietzsche. The installation’s fifteen sentences, distributed in various positions along the walls, suggest a quest both experiential and introspective. They play on the complex relationships between history, archeology and the role of the visitor to complete the work themselves. The artist, an originator of appropriation and well known for the use of texts and quotations of others for his works, has decided in this case, and for the first time since 1979, to construct the texts himself.

‘Fifteen stones in place, all out of shadow, these lit words make visible both the viewer and the viewed. The wall, the passage’.

Faggionato Fine Art presents an exhibition of the Californian artist Wayne Thiebaud. Known best for his deadpan still-life paintings from the 1960s of sugary confections, delicatessen counters, toys and everyday consumer objects, Thiebaud has continued to revisit these themes with an undiminished energy and vigor.

The exhibition comprises some twenty works including landscape and cityscape paintings of his native San Francisco with their distorted, dizzying views of the city’s streets and hillsides, as well as still-lifes such as "Little Deli", 2001 and "Table Setting", 2009.

The show takes the viewer on a journey of different subject matter, produced at different times in different eras and in different media. Whether a nude, a landscape, or a still life of a man’s hat, the focus is the visual language the works all share: the luscious handling of heavily textured paint; the brilliant palette; the intensity of light; the shifts in perspective; simplified, conceptualized forms; and “subject matter that glints, glimmers and glitters in a flawless dance with light and shadow”.

Known as, and frequently referred to as a “painter’s painter”, Thiebaud is less concerned about a naturalistic depiction or true likeness of his subject, but more interested in solving formal issues. The artist explains: “Painting is a series of problems that you are trying to solve – base, color, design, composition and those intrinsic characteristics, rather than all of the things which happen afterwards extrinsically – expressions, individualism, subject matter, iconography. It’s all important but first and foremost for me, is the formal plan.”

For all its bright modernity Thiebaud’s art readily pays homage to past traditions. Whilst his brushwork is influenced by the action and colour field painters, the compositional arrangements look back to Chardin, Manet, Giorgio Morandi and Edward Hopper, amongst other heroes.

Born in 1920, Thiebaud first gained national attention in 1962 with a one person show of still life paintings at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. The first major retrospective of his work was held in 1985, followed by a second in 2001 - 02, which traveled from the Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, his retrospective exhibition "Wayne Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting" was held at the Palms Spring Museum which will travel to the San Jose Museum of Art in early 2010.