Pars pro toto
Denicolai & Provoost
2024
UV print on two pinewood boards
16 x 22.5 x 2 cm each
Edition of 8 copies, signed and numbered by the artists on a certificate, and 3 artist’s proofs
“Pars pro toto” is a Latin expression meaning “a part for the whole.” In rhetoric, it is a figure of speech used to designate a thing by means of one of its elements or parts. The title playfully underscores the multiple displacements and samplings that take place in this work. In the form of a strange diptych puzzle, Pars pro toto presents two images of a sculptural object subjected to a simple action: half a watermelon, with a hole filled by half an apple. Two circles are pierced in the wooden panels, echoing the circles formed by the plate and the two cut fruits. The size of these two circles differs slightly, as do their shades of gray, taken from different parts of the image, like enlargements of details that clutter up the image itself. Through this absurd and elementary game, these combinations of shapes, hues, and dimensions that arouse our attention and resist us like a child in its first encounters with logic, this piece mischievously stages the construction and circulation of meaning.
Denicolai & Provoost's exhibition took place at Keijiban from January 15 to February 14, 2025.