Nicolas Ceccaldi at Édouard Montassut

(link)

Fan art quickly leads to the extremes of content. At one end you have the pure libidinal energy of slash fiction / rule34 / sonichu into the deepest depravity of desire. At the other end you have the desire to elevate, make "cool" and consumable and you see Shepard Fairey storm troopers and pencil drawings of Darth Vader measured in hours of work. While the latter only serves as offering to valorize its master the IP - the pervert instead steals the content and moves it into their own playpen. For instance Puppies Puppies unauthorized public-domaining of the today's modern epics (Spongebob, LoTR) - treating them as oral traditions that can be used for our own purposes, fuck The Mouse, and create our own worlds, rather than eternally paint pictures of our tourism in other's properties. This not being the druids we're looking for. 

Zhiliang Zhao at Lulu & Hélène Fauquet at Édouard Montassut

(Zhao, Fauquet)

Two strategies in our current glass. One manifests an excess materiality as defense - declarative flag in mud. The other exacerbates glass. That we look through so much glass today has refracted art to implicitly shift around this invisible structure framing our experience: this why we see so much mud today, so many cartoons for instagram, so much iconographic surrealism with the depth of iPad. The world is viewed predominantly through these lenses, through lens, glass, 4k screen. Seeing Jasper Johns in person like viewing a woolly mammoth at the history center. "Oh they have art on computers now." We bend around and through it. We've been saying this for a while are you bored yet?

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Materialphilia, Federico Herrero at Lulu, Rose Marcus at Night Gallery, Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut