All images courtesy and copyright of the artist and space.
What pleasure? The title of the exhibition indicates the identities and enables the association: Bernard Arnault, president of the LVMH group, Mark Zuckerberg, president of Facebook and Rihanna, pop singer and businesswoman, president of the Fenty brand. Formally, the display insists on the notion of sequence: that of structures, portraits and the black-red-blue color code. The reframings indicate the artist’s engagement with these images, mummified and sublimated icons, presented in icy placidity. Plasticized and chromatically coupled, the sequentiality acts out the rhythm of the dynamics of pleasure: it fixes the perception, directs the movements, provokes the desires.
How to get pleasure? In the epistemic model of the network, we cannot make clear distinctions between the types of agency of the works of art, the artists and the spectators. The only function of these actors is to perform the network, and their identity is thus given by their behavior. The backlighting of these images is maintained, refusing a compensatory effect of the exit of the digital. These images are avatars, and the users become by-products of their activity.
In Établissement d’en face, the repetition of structures, a hybrid mime of fair booths and tombs, forces the bodies to an inter-passivity that responds to the inter-mediality of the images. These entities do not possess their own reflection or rather, their reflection is diluted in the color code associated with them. Christophe de Rohan Chabot displaces the language strategies of these networks through a form of funeral rite.
Paolo Baggi