— So, is art today a dialogue between accomplices? — said Yayo. We all fell silent, surprised by the remark. We had been talking about Duchamp and what might have been his first ready-made: the bilboquet he gifted to Max Bergmann, his companion during late nights in the taverns and brothels of Montmartre. Bergmann — a German painter who had studied art in Paris — recounts in his diary a memorable spree in Marcel’s company. A few days later, he would receive the toy, on which Duchamp had engraved with a punch: Bilboquet / Souvenir de Paris / À mon ami M. Bergmann / Duchamp printemps 1910.

If we consider that the meaning of the bilboquet was transparent to the artists, it is not clear to us why Duchamp engraved that inscription on the ball of the toy. The object undoubtedly alludes to what happened that bohemian night, and it is difficult to resist an erotic reading. All the details, however, died with the friends. The complicity between Max and Marcel, forged in school and in the streets, is embodied in a singular object: the bilboquet. A proto-ready-made that precedes the first one — Bicycle Wheel — by three years, and its conceptualization by five.

A dialogue between accomplices? Would art now begin with an exchange of glances, with two hands clasping, with a party, with a hug? Is the artist, then, the one who invents relationships between people through signs, images, forms, actions, or gestures? The one who produces reality through acts that expose the art world only to then escape it and embed themselves into everyday life?

For Nicolas Bourriaud, an artist today is not only someone who creates paintings, sculptures, or even installations. The artist merely stages exhibitions: the new unit of art. Thus, the isolated artwork is not significant, for meaning would be established in the possible paths between one artwork and another within the same exhibition and between them and all other artworks in art.

The exhibition A Casa by Alan Fontes obliges us to reflect on these possibilities of insertion into the real through the exacerbation of painting as a medium. The impure and the contaminated settle into the exhibition space and point to the doubled fiction of the pictorial material, which expands and merges into real furniture. The paintings no longer create imagined spaces, no longer open windows to the landscape, nor even to the interior. The paintings are merely paintings on the walls of an impossible house — the simulacrum of a home installed inside an art gallery.

Of course, we can still enter this illusory space and see in these paintings other images: those of the artworks that appear within them, shamelessly cited. A dialogue between accomplices. A game among art students, a play between young people who, like Marcel and Max, spend endless nights threading conversations riddled with innuendo, with shared affinities, with fierce divergences.

I stack plush toys in the corner of the bedroom and you understand that I want to remember Anette. One bedroom window will (always) open to Lucien’s backyard; from the other we will (always, too) see David’s pool. Since we like them so much, we want to keep them close all the time. No matter how distant or how close they are to our time or space: Eugênio, Rosângela, Orson, Félix, Beatriz, and so many others. Our friends. Our accomplices.

The house, then, is open to celebration and to complicity. The house is open. Let us enter.