We can’t go home again

This second Didier Faustino's solo exhibition at Michel Rein in Paris is an abstract work of display that, beginning with its title, echoes the entertainment society motto “the show must go on”.

Didier Faustino draws increasingly on his architectural experience to counter the contemplative boredom and aphasic trends of today’s world.

He does not see the gallery space as a pretext for radical transformations – and nor is the performative element dear to his early works, marked by a sense of the body in transit. The previous works seem, rather, to have been the essential tools with which to cut out meaningful figures.

This second solo exhibition at Michel Rein in Paris is an abstract work of display that, beginning with its title, echoes the entertainment society motto “the show must go on”. Even the visitors are totally removed and integrated/invited via an atopic and treacherous play on words since, apart from his detached classifying vision, there is nothing to take home. It is an entomological exercise with 13 unusual suits, armours or more properly cells punctuating the passage from physical to mental space.

Like skins discarded in an abrupt cultural mutation, this prêt à porter cut out of carpet and other materials such as felt and polystyrene is a catalogue of living whims for an urban humanity to which only the concept of comfort remains dear. It is hard not to imagine a species that no longer knows how to live in its body, constantly occupied as it is with inner/outer conflict.

These pieces of armour draw lofty references such as Beuys’ felt and Absalon’s Cells but these uniforms clearly do not refer to a sense of protection or a space of resistance. The one on the floor, in particular, brings to mind the carpets used to roll up corpses or under which the ashes are hidden but this only occurs when you exercise an imaginary gore and detached irony that seem an unconscious Faustino reference.

The entrance panel bearing the cut-out words the show must go home acts as a surreal Magritte-like device with its letters cut in the wood and allowing the asbestos-yellow of the survival blankets to show through. This is the true abyss that opens our eyes to the giddy transgression, the relationship between an inside and an outside that, this being an exhibition space, goes back to an art system in which the works – and every residual object – are either trash or trophy.

It is on this fictitious frontier that Didier Faustino places his small army, his platoon of sarcophagi-parkas, with the visitors placed on the side. He attempts to overturn a hybrid form of perception like that inscribed in an old Chris Burden work. L.A.P.D. police uniforms, is a 1970s’ work by the American artist in which police uniforms recreate a sense of power and dominance via the evocative force of being juxtaposed in space.

In the case of this exhibition, visitors walk through the set of a Minimalist B-movie. From the floors to behind the doors and on the walls, it is geometry that orders the emergence of ghostly presences – or maybe we are in one of all those contemporary boutiques where the time-option has been suspended. It is a bizarre connection to the immaterial that seems quite unresolved.

The protections hanging on the walls are made from the materials that usually clad the floors of our homes and are re-contextualised in the familiar forms of Faustino’s design. It is probably not by gazing at the floor that we shall find the real high derivation of this work. It may be an invitation to revisit Vito Acconci, one of the French-Portuguese artist’s first sources of inspiration. In his 1972 Seedbed at the Sonnabend Gallery the bareness of the proposition was, after all, symmetrical to these sensual variations, on show here and imbued with the same masturbatory monotony. Merely reversible traces of our allergic and stereotyped relationship with the awareness of contemporary living.

We can’t go home again

This second Didier Faustino's solo exhibition at Michel Rein in Paris is an abstract work of display that, beginning with its title, echoes the entertainment society motto “the show must go on”.

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