David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts, New York

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Hold a fashion magazine up to warbled silver. The effect ostensibly providing the "nightmare" and "post-apocalypse" to what otherwise are a snapchat's night out. They just look fun. You can't out nihilist fashion - that's a loser's game - these already begun their pleasance. If they were paintings they'd already be on the high courts walls. Their crayon applies a backrooms feel, underdog, pulled from the notebook of a derelict clown. Their paper being their critical strength. Otherwise they'd just be silver mirrors. 

 

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

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“Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras" and Rappeneau draws apathetic youth in one of the most disquieting. Further references: The Pieta, Starry Night and Tamagachis: the youth are bored, despondent, they are nervous and pallid, but worst they're nostalgic. Cylindric reference reflects in anamorphosis to project history as bigger than it, in a point that culminates here.  Looking back to see yourself reflected in the glass already containing all the gold you can fish, to find yourself trapped on the silver side of the mirror, your reflection. And Rappeneau's endless inscriptions in this silver surface, this hypertrophied advertorial ennui embodying all the post-manic fallout of DISmagazine, its fatigue, is brutal, tiring.


See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts



So our references here are all tied together, we’ve got Fashion advertorial ennui in the heroin chic vein, injected with post-Akira Gabber stylings, like Tom Nijhuis's 2011 throwback /1995. A Richard Hawkinsian party complete with smoking effeminate zombie boys. The real appeal here is just seeing something drawn. The silver subject matter almost kin contemporary still life, just banal enough to seem vaguely post-critical critical. A sort of interest in the uncanny-valley of the manga rendered bodily Mad in volumetric distortions, but not so far as the outright weirding of it of by Julien Ceccaldi, to whom these will be endlessly compared.