Camille Blatrix at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

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An artist working in the simulacra, in the sign systems, in the question of a yoga pants basic versus the tactical version. Why do adult toys begin to look like elegant spacecraft. Why do vacuums look like mechanistic Star Wars droids? This is not functional form, but form conjuring affect, comfort, sales. 100HP dildos designed to sell. Getting off is tertiary to its main acts of looking sexually swallowable. The restaurant's table itself tells you how long to sit. They tell us what we are. This is all well documented. The point now is it's fun art theater.

Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art

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Artists engaging in traditional crafts, marquetry and woodblock. But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. And these are two artists who's importance is the plasticity of style - the sort of whatever possibility of plastic goos, bent for artistic purposing. New images in old habits. So it's odd then to have a press release calling the whole thing into question, a excerpt from a 1906 book of traditional wood crafts lamenting novelty:

"If there is one quality which more than another marks the demand of the present day it is the requirement of novelty. ...the question is not, 'Is this fresh thing good? Is it well-fitted for its intended uses?' but 'Is it novel?' ... dispens[ing] with tradition, and ... set forth with childlike naïveté. Careful study of these experiments discloses the fact that .... the undigested use of natural motifs results not in nourishment but in nightmare"

This would all depend on whether we believe this art to be "undigested designs indifferently executed which have little but a fancied novelty to recommend them.” Not a "...a saner view of what constitutes originality by setting before them something of the experience of past times, when craft tradition was still living and the designer had a closer contact with the material in which his design was carried out than is usual at present." Surely this is not today. But there's something I'm not willing to throw away with the show. Somehow its uselessness seems the point, an abuse of interest. 

see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Camille Blatrix at Wattis

Camille Blatrix at Wattis

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The hospital aesthetic. How objects present themselves when encountering you in your vulnerable situations. Which in a Gallery is a pleasant change, to have an object soften itself to you, rather than brutalize you with austerity. A softening [that is] less the adoption of commericial interest in infantalising you [luxury car interiors that look as intestinal as they do sexual] and of which much similar art interprets but instead a vulnerable thing. The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us.  Like that other Camille, Chaimowicz, the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans. This is what iPhones will look like in the future. They are already starting to. Like baleens overturned and vibrating.


See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi