Camille Blatrix at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

(link)

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.

SIGNA at Simian & Angélique Aubrit, Ludovic Beillard at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue

(Simian, Cd'ACLS)

We had always predicted Wilkes to come back, but never expected its haunting to be literalized into performance. Nor in matching colors. Wilke's materialism no longer enough, we need stronger ghosts.  

see too: Cathy Wilkes 

“Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

(link)

Why has the gothic returned? It has metastasized, a gothic grown on gothic. A more byperbolic version. Sometimes it's easier to embrace pain, ruin, than it is to desire change, which would leave possibility for disappointment. Instead welcoming the car crash to feel some control over its. We peek through doors at madness, horror, peel back scalps to see skull's white, as a comfort to state, surely the end-times will not be as bad as this.
The gothic's dissolution from historical marker to stylistic genre, like steampunk or retrofuturism, holds onto an anachronism, an implicit nostalgia for the past's future, rather than our own. What the Victorians had imagined as horror, pools of blood and pendulum cuts, is far more genteel than what is our current madness. This is the pleasure-saftey of genre, it has rules.


See too: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium