Group show → Waiting Room

The chairs sculpted by Julian Farade climb the walls and refuse to welcome anyone onto their seats. As if caught in a distorting mirror, these sculptures remind us of the sentimental relationships we have with objects, onto which we project a part of ourselves. They are beings in their own right, who Farade calls Patients, each seemingly awaiting a diagnosis or comforting words to break the wait. With shifting limbs and minds, each Patient lets us see their inner torments, the sense of solitude expressed in this suspended time reinforced by the clinical whiteness of the white-cube walls. On the surface of their skin, we read the expression of a strong personality: some with bristly velvet, soft but agitated in appearance, others with twisted legs or a disturbingly relaxed attitude.

Farade assigns a place of its own to his sculptural practice, which now exists independently. The velvet that in his recent series served as a background for the paint now swells in three dimensions and emancipates itself from the frame, the soft-sculptures no longer interact solely with canvases. He works the material like his drawing line, spontaneous and direct, seeking to weave a return to the sensitive, and thus to think with Annie Le Brun that “poetry begins with the non-lie”.

The three men facing us, stoically standing, are reminiscent of a military corps, the young captives in Pasolini’s Salò, and the models in Raf Simons’ Kraftwerk-inspired “Radioactivity” collection (Autumn/Winter 1998). These multiple references come together in Alex Foxton’s painting to focus on what they have in common: young, controlled bodies with a strict look, their red shirts incised by a long black tie. Here, Foxton uses a positive-negative approach to color, concentrating its effects and arresting our gaze on these bodies that threaten us as a single block. This limited choice of colors is as narrow as contemporary Western men’s clothing, which since the 19th century has been reduced to the “black uniform”, a consecrated form of dress in the face of the supposed frivolity of women’s colorful outfits. Foxton assumes his taste and knowledge of the masculine suit, to which he devoted several years as a designer, and puts this figure of masculinity into perspective at a time when it is being overperformed and reduced to its most classic and rigorous codes.
Group compositions are also increasingly present in Alex Foxton’s work. While the artist’s attention is always focused on the physical body, today he approaches it more in terms of its relationship to the group, the way it is shaped by various social and political influences. These three anonymous figures, whose boundaries are difficult to discern, seem to form a single entity.

They are answered by a Saint Sebastian whose vivid charcoal lines counteract the eternal expectation of the bound young martyr, riddled with arrows and erotic projections. As if the codes of masculinity could not escape their patriarchal demonstration of violence and control.

Vojtěch Kovařík is dedicated to deconstructing all that is authoritative, dismantling grand narratives and their heroes, leaving traces of individual mythology and giving them new relevance. He draws inspiration from the strategies of National Socialist art, replacing glorious workers with a pantheon of Greek gods confined within frames too narrow to contain the weight of their own symbolism. Fascinated by the allegorical power of myths, he detects in them the great tensions of our time: the quest for identity, social metamorphosis, ecological crisis, the struggle for freedom.

In Pilgrimage, presented in the exhibition, he paints a massive, red face, modeled in sand and acrylic—a hero stopped in mid-transition, traversed by doubts. The pilgrimage he embodies is an inner quest. Myth here becomes a cathartic and reflective tool, a way of reading through our contemporary chaos, perhaps with the promise of a metamorphosis.

Produced towards the end of Jean Dubuffet’s life, between 1981 and 1982, the Psycho-sites series marks a turning point: 500 works in one year, with an urgency of execution that extends the collages and assemblages of the Théâtres de mémoire and moves him towards the abstraction of the Non-lieux. These ambiguous compositions, saturated with raw colors and schematic figures partitioned between thick lines, evoke mental places. Dubuffet no longer seeks to represent: he projects an inner experience, a state. The place becomes “psycho”, no longer geographical but psychic.

In “Waiting Room”, Dubuffet’s intimate work questions our way of seeing, understanding and inhabiting the world: “All these small paintings are based on the conviction that there is no reason to differentiate between a site claimed to be real and a mere fantasy, since everything we think we see is always and in any case arbitrarily the production of the mind.” (J.D May 1982).

Omniprésence, ORLAN’s operation carried out in New York on November 21, 1993, is probably the most ambitious performance of its kind. The artist met with surgeon Dr. Marjorie Cramer, who unreservedly accepted the artistic and feminist aims of her project: the radical transformation of her face through implants in the cheeks and temples. ORLAN’s request to this doctor was to divert plastic surgery from its usual objectives, and help her to question the standards of beauty that plastic surgery usually seeks to perpetuate.

In addition to the photos of the performance, ORLAN has produced a whole series of portraits. In two of the photographic portraits in the series Ceci est mon corps...ceci est mon logiciel, ORLAN poses coquettishly, covered in bruises. The artist’s frontal, swollen face is framed very closely, capturing every trace of the operation. Her proud, almost hieratic pose seems to assert transformation as a sovereign, assertive and powerfully political act.