Marius Engh - Dr. Faustroll’s Study

Engh’s most recent work turns toward complex socio-fantastical scenarios from the autobiographical novel Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien (1898), by the French proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry. The topic and goal for Marius Engh is its translation, first figurative from forms and images, then linguistic – from French to Norwegian.

The furnishings in Dr. Faustroll’s Study build on the good doctor’s assertion that the imagined is real and that one lives all ways at once, and just as well in a book – ergo that book is a full house.  In it, daily occurrences and internally and externally dreamed worlds merge with times, conversations, personas, places and things, with their likely and unlikely acquaintances, their links and juxtapositions in Jane. A carnival of being.

Engh’s Dr. Faustroll is a child of Jarry’s pataphysics, his science of imaginary solutions, one that proposes the observation and study of exceptions instead of generalities, because only exceptions ever actually occur. Only they are interesting. A generality, he observes, must assume a singular vantage point for all participants, a still life that in fact never happens.

For the time being in Jane, Dr. Faustroll’s Study is where Marius Engh will sit – in the book he translated – we can read him.