ISAAC
LYTHGOE
5225
FIGUEROA MOUNTAIN RD
26
June – 30 July 2016
ALMANAC
191
Southwark Park Road
SE16 3TX,
London
All
Images Courtesy: The Artist and Almanac, London/Turin.
All
Photography: Oskar Proctor.
The works
band together to celebrate the birth of the cool, and resist its growing up –
growing up poor, growing up managed, growing up in the art world.
Captured
behind the screen, the protagonists of this world have become prisoner to a
forbidden desire for simultaneous blackness and whiteness.
Impossible
to consummate, their bodies are shielded by a transparent boundary of childhood
ritual, an endless repetition of pillow talk and nursery rhymes.
Walking
in the shadow of violence and luxury, the emotional labour of so many
manager/agents produces an inventory of lines of flight (Egyptian cotton, filtered
water, chupa chups and cola).
Sheltered
by the innards of a commercial framework, meticulously curated, the glass
ceiling of celebrity serves as an inverted mirror.
The
cruelty of adolescence and the promise of the future become the greatest threat,
the intimacy of the bed refined to the cerebral gaze, and freedom is nothing
but choreography.
A
necessary and known evil, these bodies are shaped by the seductive
architectures of artifice, an empty sexuality reveling in sugar-pop culture,
cheap tricks and magic.
The
physical body is barely needed for this performance – the avatar of the female
nude in painting morphed into the zombie-cyborg ancestor of the nineties white
cube.
Andy
Warhol would not have known what to do with this much space, let alone Titian.
Floating
on air, walking on the moon.
Inflatable
promises, inexistent supports.
Text: Astrid Korporaal
Text: Astrid Korporaal
ARTIST’S
TEXT
Late
Saturday night we’ve only risk management. The spinning of our given moment’s
scenarios. Hitting the bed and its dark, cold and we bugs reach for each other.
Dumb and blind we fuck. Sharpened genitals penetrate body cavities, splitting
lower abdomens and coming straight there. Punching holes in torsos, there’s
traumas in the sheets. We men fuck all hopefully, fuck each other accidentally.
Women evolved some small defence against this all, a mass of cells spawns up;
swells around to seal their wounds. The sperm an antiseptic softens and soothes
the blow some. For us men though its different, we die in those sheets,
pathogens spread wild.
You will
be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of
life - to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every
creature which lives must do so. We too have been there; we can still hear the
sound of the surf, though we won’t land anymore.
It was
not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, we had long lost count of
the days; but always if we wanted to do anything special we said it’s Saturday
night, and then we did it. He would come down laughing over something fearfully
funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was.
Coming up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to to
say for certain what had been happening. Everything in life is just for a
while, but, often it was just like this.
When you
wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to
bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind, and on the
top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to
put on.
We burn
on recurrences, brand and obsession, snapshots, pangs. All the meanings change.
We can’t stop. I’m trying in a way to tell you a dream - splurging a vain attempt,
because no relation of my dream can convey its dream-sensation, that mingle of
absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment. All tight in a tremor of struggling
revolt, captured by the incredible; the very essence of a dream. Its
impossibilities. It’s impossible to convey in-moment-life-sensations, its
meaning-its subtle and penetrating vapours. I guess the moment you doubt
whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.