Clémentine Bruno’s complex praxis can be condensed into a study of art history’s presets and indexicals, working through its genres and repetitions as a means of questioning the artist as singular genius. If we liken the writer to the artist, as Bruno posits in her work, words as much as images are infinitely interchangeable to produce different narratives and visual compositions. Deeply inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s phrase “bête comme un peintre” (dumb as a painter), Bruno interprets Duchamp’s statement as a critique of the artist as innovator. Rather than remaining subject to the constraints of pictorial language, even when its figurative limits are strained and questioned through the emergence of abstraction by painters such as Cézanne, Duchamp instead challenges painting’s ability to rest on coherent visual representation to derive meaning. Bruno appropriates Duchamp’s thought in the contemporary, questioning the medium’s reliance on its permanence and value of the author’s subjectivity in the age of reproducibility.