Start a collection

Where does a collection begin? With knowledge, or with an address passed around among insiders? Most often, it begins in front of a painting you can no longer take your eyes off, at a fair or in a studio, and you understand afterwards that something began there, before the question of price even arose.

For a long time, the art market kept that moment at a distance. Prices were not displayed, and whoever came in for the first time had to guess alone at customs no one took the trouble to explain. Yet there are two stories for one work, the story of what it is worth and the story of the work, and the first has never needed the newcomer to tell itself. The second begins with anyone who stops in front of it.

To collect is to choose to live with forms that question us, far more than to dress a wall, and that change in our eyes as the years go by. And it is a gesture that reaches beyond the one who makes it, since it supports an artist at the moment it matters and lets a work circulate beyond the studio, into the economy of an entire scene.

The eye is trained by walking, from one exhibition to the next, far more than in books. Still, one has to know that one may come in, and that is why Armature exists: to make the way in legible. We write the price next to each work, agreed with the artist, on this site as on Artsy, and we always keep works within reach of a first purchase, because a collector starts somewhere, and so does an artist.

In the scenes of the Mediterranean and Africa, the two often meet at the same moment, at the start of a trajectory that can be followed exhibition after exhibition, since we keep a dated record for each artist. You can meet the artist in the studio before seeing the works at a fair, and understand where a painting comes from before making up your mind. And once the choice is made, the work leaves with its certificate and reaches, insured, the wall it was meant for, with nothing else to see to but the choosing.

We underestimate how much a first work changes the way we look at all the others: we stop more often, we tell better what lasts from what passes, and a collection is built this way, at the speed of a life of looking, as a market is built at the speed of a working life.