catalogue : https://mailartdansleslimbes.blogspot.com/

Mail-Art dans les limbes (Mail-Art in the limbo)
Closed on May 15, the calling Mail-Art dans les limbes (Mail-Art in the limbo) launched by Thierry Tillier in November 2024, shows the public, in the Galerie Jacques Cerami in a non-profit logic, the result of an international collect with a great density. Based on the intrinsic principle of the free technique and size. No jury. No return. No theme. This calling allows all possibilities, letting the freedom to everyone, visitors included, to imagine their own meaning.
On the margins, so, with no return.
Officially born in the late 50s/early 60s, in the framework of Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School (1927-1995), in the wake of the phenomenon Fluxus and its many artistic questioning as well as the Nouveau Réalisme Français (French new realism), the mail art -with its precepts notably rooted in the European Avant-Garde from the early 20th century- specifically uses postal mail with its components and services not only as a creation support but also as a means of diffusion. At the time, it was alternative and activist, initially positioned “next to” the works of art traditional monstration and sales canals, this trend (this “river” as Ray Johnson named it) is a parallel space-time with a total freedom. Transgressive, critical, sometimes on the border of legality, it gives way to all approaches and postures.
Today, even if it has entered the institutions for a long time with various collections, it is being listed in huge inventories and archiving, exhibitions and reasoned catalogues, mail-art continues to blossom, along hazardous meetings, spontaneous exchanges between artists or callings on dedicated platforms. Thanks to this, fortunately, this mail-art seems to keep on preserving, “outside” the official networks, its spontaneously libertarian and dissenting nature, its range of application, escaping by this way to any try to confine it. So, the present exhibition will be seen as the occasion, still rare, to discover the “marginal” universe of mail-art, and all this without any commercial goal, which is quite exceptional -let’s underline it- among an art gallery.
Thierry Tillier (Charleroi 1957), who has made his mark from Belgium in this international trend since the early 70s, is still today one of its figureheads.
Freedom-loving collage artist and cartographer, deeply committed, fond of esotericism, occultism, he grabs the images that surrender us, submerge us, and that are destined to a programmed loss of meaning. His collages -numerous enigmatic proposals, mixing visual poetry (in its true meaning) and social critic in a purposedly erotic aesthetics- are as well interfaces between him and the world, resistance actions and kaleidoscopic reflects of our society. Connected, anchored to the world, if Thierry Tillier is the heir -status he doesn’t claim- of a one-century-old collage tradition, he is above all an artist concerned about the fact of being useful today.
As a result, he chooses, sorts out, cuts, rips, covers, uncovers and unfolds his paper universe to the face of a complex world that inspires him. The images with which he plays split up, multiply, and the levels of reading overlap again and again, taking with them the spectator at first seduced, then fascinated, troubled, to a journey of more meanings and questioning. So, anchored in a society in which he sees the traps, Tillier, with his collages, opens for us not only the doors to his “inside hell” but also the way to an always salutary questioning.
In this context, the collective dynamic of networking, of communication, of exchange and of sharing, feature of mail-art and its linked self-expression, escaping any control or judgement, seems to feed him. As a result, would this calling Mail Art dans les limbes (mail-art in the limbo) be another way for him to take the pulse of the world, and also to act and claim it?
As for the reference to the limbo, once again, it is obscure, as Thierry likes it, with a direct link to a proper universe that we won’t dare spoil (even if we would want it) as he himself qualifies it as hidden. So, those who will discover it will be those who can or want it. It is not an enigma to resolve, but different levels of reading that are to take into account, would that be in its incomprehension.
As for the result of the calling launched from Vis, a small city in Croatia where the artist from Chaleroi now lives, if once again it confirms the idea that mail-art is only synonymous with polymorph and free approach, it confirms its egalitarian, deeply democratic and non-elitist character.
In addition, in an increasingly virtual world, there are plenty of callings for artistic participation through email and digital art -and with the digital divide, this postal art in its analogical version, in his historical setting up, is paradoxically densified/amplified from the fact of its diversified and obsolete materiality, “delicious celebration of ink, paper and stamps”, whether it is made by a master of the discipline (you’ll find more than one in this exhibition) or not.
And what does this materiality say, this materiality post-paid, stamped, consolidated by its travel from a place to another, by its handling by a postman, by its impatient reception and finally by its delicate seal breaking?
What do those works of art say from their space-time journey? What do they say, those hybrid incarnations, those concentration of meaning on some square centimetres, about their creators, their recipients, about their spirit and the philosophy that moves them – generous and collaborative artists – about the network on which they exist and that makes them legitimate, about us who observe them, about art itself, about the world, about its excesses and, do we have to say it, about the state of resistance implicitly made aware and critical of mail art toward them ?
Unless you are a deep connoisseur of the approach of one or the other of those more than 200 (!) participants, these consignments, these ‘circulating” works of art will stay, for most of them, an enigma ; that’s the rule of an articulation reputedly secret between correspondents. And that’s fortunate, since these envelopes, stamps, postcards, photographs, drawings, paintings, collages, items and texts are in fact messages sent to Thierry that the latter will personally archive. He generously lets us perceive them in their multiple singular details in a relationship which actually is literally and inevitably physical, almost corporal. As far as Thierry’s answers are concerned, they will stay, for the moment, by definition, unknown.
But these shipments are also the vectors of looks on the world. And this is exactly that duality that, mainly, determines the deep nature of it. This duality rests, on one hand, on the intimacy of a relationship -the personal exchange between artists- and, on the other hand, on the social or dissenting scope, dare we say strike force, of original works satisfying the universal need to communicate and so, to exist in the relationship with the other, to emerge to him, without taboo, without hindrance, without censorship, enabling it to be born. Confusing ambivalence.
So, Germany, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Brasil,
Canada, China, South Korea, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, Euskadi, France, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, United Kingdom, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Czech Republic , Turkiye, Uruguay, Usa… are the departure, the origins that, once pinned on a world map -as Tillier does it- and linked to their destination, trace the pathway of a vast chain of artists, of an impressive rhizome of eclectic and random concerns.

Collective, collaborative work, it comes to Couillet, Walloon town, from Vis, small island on the Adriatic sea that has become, for a moment, the beating heart of a worldwide network which, since the 1960s, has been growing and – in the form of a choral chant, of a polyphonic poetry, performed by thousands of extinct voices, present and still to come- questioning the world and resisting.
On the margins with no return.

Coraly Aliboni
Historienne de l’art
Mai 2025