«It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations1» Born in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg belongs to the first generation of conceptual artists and takes part, as early as 1969, in the exhibition "when attitudes take shape". His work articulates numerous references taken from popular culture to mass communication, as well as from literature or "religion". It integrates autobiographic or self-reflexive elements and does not prefer any particular medium to others, though text and image are proeminent. The work often has recourse to borrowed components and "collages": it humorously sets up a form of plots in what could be described as "sets", produced by a system of crossed references, both formal or symbolic. Ruppersberg’s practice installs a fragmentary methodology that could in a sense be compared to apophenia, defined as an altered perception of the subject. It leads him to link events or phenomena, which at first sight do not have obvious causal or exclusively rational relations between them. "Perception goes beyond the rationality of the individual", in a form of intellect close to pareidolia. It pushes the spectator to speculate and formulate hypotheses, as in the context of prestige or the practice of illusion. Rupperberg procede by producing works that seemingly have to be elucidated, giving us a certain amount of clues, but also red herring and missing pieces. The works propose a game of patience in which the spectator may or may not have to reconstruct a logic internal to the artist's work which, under the guise of boing protocolar, includes a part of hazard and randomness that prevents its total resolution.

The Mystery of Nabokov... brings together a group of three works by Allen Rupperberg, which articulate a relationship to his studio as both a work and a resource constitutive of his practice. It is a veritable archive, an accumulation of books, films, posters, photographs, records, various objects and curiosities that the artist has collected over many years. He has arranged them without any order or pre-established layout, but with the same care he took in building up his works: covering the walls from floor to ceiling in order to create the work of a lifetime, a matrix, as the only framework for his practice.

1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Penguin Modern Classics, London, p 176