Using a few handwritten words, one or more photographs, and occasionally newspaper cuttings, Daniel Blaufuks embarks on a daily exercise in observation, poetry and introspection. Apart from the regularity of the practice and the date of the day, the only figure he imposes on himself is that of the frame of an A4 page promised to the composition of the day. The project the days are numbered, launched in 2018, seeks to make the artist's questions, reflections and obsessions tangible. But while it is indeed an attempt to write a diary, the first person singular is often absent, and reading it will give us little insight into the intimate life of its author. It is the diary of a child of exile, who blurs into the words of several languages: that of his Jewish grandparents exiled from Germany and fleeing Nazism; Portuguese, his adopted language; French, the language of the Surrealists and of Perec, which runs through his work; and finally English, which calls forth the fulgurating voice of Bob Dylan or of our cinematic imaginations. The subjects he depicts are never really spectacular. He has made Jules Verne's injunction "Look with all your eyes, look"(*) his own, and captures, in the banality of the little things of everyday life,  a truth that unites us. The noise of the world is never heard directly; it is the light outside or the press that carries it. The newspaper is also about time, the way it is and the way it is. The present that it records and the past that haunts us. The time of our little lives and the time of history. Far from historical truths, and invited to continue his work in Brittany, Daniel Blaufuks has applied his research into the memory of the Resistance to the ways in which it is constructed in ruptures or cadences, eroded or maintained - but also to the new forms it can adopt in our time. An installation of 204 pages from the newspaper invites us to take a subjective stroll, a tribute and a meditation on the memory of the places and the Resistance of the Second World War. It is indeed a memory of memory that we are dealing with here, and if the diary, with its programmatic title, the days are numbered, sometimes calls for melancholy, it also reminds us that each day is new and that its history is being written in the present.


(*) Michel Strogoff, by Jules Verne (1876).


The Journal de résistance series is the result of a residency at the Centre d'art GwinZegal in partnership with the Musée de la résistance en Argoat. With the support of the Région and the Drac Bretagne, as part of the residency programme.