Contemporary Art Daily

Artist: Claire Fontaine

Venue: Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels

Exhibition Title: Changement de propriétaire (Change of owner)

Date: March – April, 2009

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels

Press Release:

On the occasion of her exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed Claire Fontaine works on one of her recurrent themes : the crisis and its effects on the body and desires. In Changement de propriétaire she presents different works connected to each other by the way they evoke recycling, cleaniness, the contrasted functionality of household appliances and solitude.

The sculpture exhibited in the window Untitled (flag dryer) composed of a modified industrial dryer and of several Belgian flags tackles the cycle and the stagnation as typical aspects of the rags of any national identity. The continuous drying of the flags is in the same time a bitter consideration about corruption and a comment on the Belgian habit of displaying the national flag outside apartment windows; this action is compared to the one of hanging out the washing, that even if not dirty, would be better far from the eyes of the passerby.

The work Untitled (dildo washer) echoes it, is a domestic dishwasher filled with latex dildos. The dildo, being the symbol of the deepest promiscuity between the object and the human flesh, a very schematic example of fetishism, becomes here an industrial washable tool to be reused by others within an anonymous chain of the consumption of satisfaction.

The neon sign Please God Make Tomorrow Better flashes in the rhythm of hazard light and points a suspended present and a general impotency to act upon the future.

The sculpture I displays a video of the destruction of an I-Phone transmitted by an horizontal plasma screen lying on the gallery floor, it can be read as a comment on the touch screen technology that pushes the user to caress its machine and to speak through it as if he was speaking to it. A screen becomes the messenger of the demolition of another smaller one, whose detached and ruined parts look like its own interior.

The various paintings are as many considerations on the vulgarity of the visual field in our time and on its inevitable promiscuity with advertising.

Claire Fontaine, Paris March 2009

Link: Claire Fontaine at Sorry We’re Closed