Impressions of Raymond Roussel
‘Locus Solus: Impressions of Raymond Roussel’ is the first major exhibition to trace the artistic legacies of Raymond Roussel; fin de siècle poet, dandy, impresario, self-cast genius and a guiding light to many of the past century’s most notable figures in Western arts and letters. Through a presentation of interrelated artworks and ephemera, the exhibition looks at the details of Roussel’s life and work to draw trajectories of its influence through leaps in time and geography. That a coherent exhibition could gather material by figures as disparate as Jules Verne, Marcel Duchamp, the College of Pataphysics, Marcel Broodthaers, Allen Ruppersberg and Mike Kelley, testifies not only to the strange magnetism of this work, but to the remarkable investment of the Museo Reina Sofía and guest curator François Piron. To walk through the exhibition is to experience what may happen when a major institution flexes its muscles.
The show commences amidst the Proustian Paris that Roussel inhabited, and insists that his work cannot be known without grasping something of his surrounds. Cabinets are devoted to Jules Verne and his meticulous heroes, such as the ever-scheduled Phileas Fogg. In an adjoining room Georges Méliès film Le Voyage à Travers de L’Impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (1904) is projected alongside photos of Roussel dressed as a boy in carnival costume. Roussel’s hallmark exaltation of genius and the polymath (among which he counted himself) is discovered here in a world of secular wonder; a realm of pure imagination that is not transcendent but rendered in the finest material detail—the vividness of a sea-monster described down to its very last scale.
Although taking himself as a classicist, the stage-productions upon which Roussel expunged his