Christian Boltanski’s work is symptomatic of a virtually obsessive frenzy for all that can be archived, documented or listed. Keeping a trace, preserving the remembrance in the form of an object, something, anything: everyone knows about his driving fascination. The artist plays on it and shows us the deep-seated anguish underpinning this drive. The obsession with numbers correlates with this. How does one go from One to the Multiple? From the individual to the collective?

From a name on a list to the entire unreadable, disproportionate list? The metaphysical dimension is always apparent in the artist’s work, in negative. It permits him to ask simple questions about our desire to keep time from slipping away. Should everything be kept? Everything preserved? Counted again? To begin all over again as if by turning back the clock we could catch it in its own trap? Christian Boltanski draws up inventories, creates archives, collects recountings. Still, he manages to combine the vanity of the task with a deeper emotion, one which obliquely drives the undertaking.

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