Jean-Luc Moulène, Sandstone Abstract, Hobart, 2021. Courtesy: the artist and the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart.

Four new artworks by French artist Jean-Luc Moulène have recently come into being at Mona. They are made from: Triassic sandstone cut from the Australian eastern seaboard; creamy wax from the fires of industry and progress; alloyed zinc smelted by the River Derwent and Bell Bay; and rainforest timber, harvested from the depths of Lake Pieman in far western Tasmania. Each material has been carefully selected, and refined through complex and meticulous processes, according to Moulène’s relentless artistic formula. An artist and many ‘teams’—curators, fabricators, digital designers, production departments, a museum—at work.

As you will see, Moulène is hard to pin down: ever-changing in his output, inquisitive to the extreme, and recognising no distinction between how life and art work. Jean-Luc Moulène and Teams will also sample other works by the artist, such as one of the very few videos made to date, pallets of juice cans ‘hijacked’ from a Mexican factory, and a large cow bone wedged between mason props: boiled clean of its meat, buried for a time, and exhumed at Bushy Park.

This exhibition—the artist’s first show in Australia—is something of a geographical feat. Moulène is based in the French countryside, a three-hour drive from Paris. Mona’s commissioning curator, Olivier Varenne, usually lives in Geneva. Their guest curator, Michel Blancsubé, is in Mexico. And Mona is on the opposite side of the world in Australia; as are the elemental materials used to make Moulène’s newest sculptures.

What does all this amount to? To even ask such a question is to become part of Moulène’s world and process, in which one question leads to another, which leads to another, and on and on it goes. A process generating endless curiosity.

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