The “PEPSIS” project is rooted in a primitive drive that the artist calls stylization, a logical phenomenon of simplification that conditions every aspect of our inner and social lives. From learning by imitation to the use of signs and symbols as means for the representation of ideas, stylization reveals the essence of our mindset, focused on influencing the course of events to our own advantage and avoiding risks and failures.
From the perspective of stylization, desires correspond to the accumulation of more and more accessible and practicable models of reference.
With the growth in the possibilities of storing information, the rate of communication and the time required for its assimilation have also increased, whence the need to simplify.
The growing number of models available leads, as a result of our cognitive limitations, to an approximation of their meaning.
The impulse to replicate lifestyles, rules of conduct and the ways in which everything is presented gives rise to the suspicion that, by the law of least effort, the desire to see what we have already seen is our inexorable fate.
The overdose of references is leveled down to a set of options without any hierarchical structure. Equivalence does not provide sufficient order and models of higher rank are not distinguished. The syntax is lost, and with it the full meaning, which is however arbitrarily stylized on the basis of conventional rules of no consequence.
With “PEPSIS” this premise of stylization becomes a method of painting, delegitimizing authenticity and the search for the new as the driving force of its history.
In this exhibition, personal suggestions are arbitrarily—and without logic—mixed with Google Lens. The works take root in a cherished jazz album cover, a scene captured from a 1992 thriller, and a photograph taken as a joke. The viewer is tempted to build links between the series, to focus on apparent shortcuts when being exposed to incoherent information. It is always easier to build our own “Musée Imaginaire” with styles, mediums and subjects that can therefore feel familiar. Like a déjà vu, it can be hard to accept that the feeling could be completely fake.
Pepsis is the scientific name of a parasitoid wasp that manipulates the behavior of other insects, turning them into brood nests for its larvae. The host insect is turned into something other than itself, giving up any attempt to avoid the fate of becoming the living meal of its parasite and a device for its replication.
at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
until November 16, 2024