“Group Show” at Hussenot

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

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Video:

Images courtesy of Hussenot, Paris

Press Release:

“Being on the side of the norm should be considered a violence that cuts us off from the rest of the world and hurts. ” Martin Page

When we left Cyril’s studio, high up in a building in Pantin , I suddenly felt that I had shared 45 minutes of deep intimacy with a stranger. Without a doubt, this is the essence of our encounter, but there is something about this artist that gives itself to you brutally, naively. “Trapped inextricably in the formulation of an emotion” is an abridged extract from the title of his video, presented in the exhibition: a micro-fiction in which a character, girl, woman, man or boy, is animated by an attempt at expression of anger or sadness. On their face, an inexorable stream of tears repeats itself in a loop, like an oversized emotion struggling to form itself.

Our project talks about affective difficulty. Saying nothing or saying too much, bonding with one another in reality or in fantasy, responding emotionally, giving up or not being able to leave, Lisa’s characters struggle within these exchanges in her drawings as in her life. Her work is always caught up by an adolescence that was never left behind, and an amorous and erotic voracity that recounts the mythological adventures of sexy creatures in parallel worlds, existing between baroque, witchcraft, video games and social networks. Throughout, bodies seduce, approach and eat each other in a cannibalism of emotions.

Thomas’s work also draws from inner worlds and uses the diary as a grimoire in which the artist collects objects as much as obsessions. Again, it’s sexual and related to sorcerers : we could cross hair and body hairs, teeth. We feel that the pages of these notebooks have been touched, that the sweat stains from the person who has manipulated remain on it, ordered, horny, taped. It’s irregular and graceful at the same time. Arranged as an offering on a pedestal, they surround the icon of youth and an eternal counter-culture at its feet. Like a monument to adolescence, Farewell Youth bows out while praising the inevitability of the passing of time.

The works here are almost performative in that they capture moments of change: to confide, to experience, to enjoy, to devour, to wait, to appear. The artists tell us about these areas of transit, of the transition as an event. Because in this relationship, there is the other, but there is also the living, the real. Matthieu’s sculptures play on stereotypes of representations. The domestic, the urban and the fantastic always come together in forms and references to untie common fictions. The sword here is made of wood, and a snake is hiding in the drawer of the bedside table, the place where we find the stories we read to fall asleep. His works also evoke boredom in our daily practices and the anxiety we have about invisibility. “I have a lot of empathy for those who are part of something else, who are not always looking to build their name or their business, but who participate anonymously in the great collective machine and are happy about that”, he said one day.

I have never met Antoine in person. Several times, I have crossed his work with streams of images and texts. I’ve experienced it physically in exhibitions. I know that his latest trompe l’oeil series tells us about visual habits. Through an almost childish manipulation, he overwhelms the ties we have to images. The illusion is real. It’s physical too, and that’s what’s important to him. You have to be there, in reality, and walk about the room to understand what you are dealing with. The work resists motionlessness as well as documentation. I know he has a sense of humor too. Like this masterful butt in plaster and resin, lying in the space like a trophy, a jubilant explosion of symbols in the middle of all the rest: the masculine, the feminine, power, domination, dance, tradition, eroticism, crossbreeding, urban culture, appropriation… so many common representations that come to mind and that we wish to hunt, because we know they are fabricated, borrowed, reductive, standardized, stolen. This is also what the sword bears in Matthew’s work. Funny and harmless, it expresses the desire to come to terms with being a boy, or what you would expect from being a boy. Plant the sword, and make peace with the violence of the game that goes with it.

Elisa Rigoulet

Link: Group Show at Hussenot