Like two purists who have put the heat on a traditionally cool domain, our collaboration artists in this issue

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (*1957) and Wolf¬gang Laib (*1950)—produce art that glows with precisely balanced gestures, subtly infiltrated signs, and cogent mental fields of force. Wolfgang Laib has chosen a spot in the Pyrenees, to form there a public place as a sanctuary of solitude, a place covered with "that energetic gold that is wax." (Jean-Marc Avrilla)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres spreads out his gigantic pictures on city billboards, symbolizing both the stillness of "being-with-oneself" and the publicness of outward thrust.

The wandering spirits of these artists take soundings of room and open space searching for the potentials of meaning. Laib and Gonzalez-Torres move the exterior world in and the interior world out; they fray the edges between outside and inside, between private and collective, treating them as pollen or curtains fluttering in the wind.

In the one case, the site of artistic practice is abstract and terrestrial; in the other, it is radically urban.

Gabriel Orozco's magical transformation of an old car, a Citroen DS, into a shape informed with a sense of privacy and self-confidence makes us wonder whether the thing has found its way into a gallery from the street or out of collective imagination and memory. Roni Horn's Insert invites us to take a mentally and physically stimulating journey to "the center of the earth."

Language: English