Manifesto

Armature: what holds a form up, and what no one sees.

What do we look at, when we look at a painting? What it does, or what it is worth? We enter a painting through its colour, we stay for what it does to us, and we leave with something we did not have when we came in. We want it to be possible to buy one in the same order, colour first, with the price, the provenance, the certificate and the transport settled before the question of price arrives.

Armature exists for this. We sell works and we have no walls. Brussels, Tunis and Dakar are our footholds, and the works go where they are looked at, to London, to Paris, to Cape Town, and further.

There are two stories for one painting. The story of what it is worth, which begins in the place of the first exhibition, passes through the collection that buys before the others, the gallery’s name on the label, the guaranteed figure in the auction room, and ends up telling itself, without the work. And the story of the work, which begins in front of it and does not end. We have looked at the first closely enough to know that no artist has a hold on it. We chose the second.

Prices are public, agreed with the artist, and we always keep works within reach of a first purchase, because a collector starts somewhere, and so does an artist. We keep a dated record for each of them, and we sign what we write. And we let time do the rest. A work goes to someone who looks at it, and a market is built at the speed of a working life. An artist belongs to no one, not even to us.

Our artists come from territories where the market has no seat, and they did not wait for it to have one before painting. They make the works, and we do everything that is not artistic, one work at a time, in the cities where the market has no seat as in those where it has one.

The artist stays in front of the canvas. We carry the rest, beneath the form, unseen, so that the eye has nothing else to do but look.