Les rois morts — Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve
At the Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery, a strange spectacle unfolds through the inventions of three artists — Charly Bechaimont, Rudy Dumas, and Romuald Jandolo — who lead us from enchantment to wreckage. In a thoughtfully designed scenography and a text equally insightful (both signed by Elora Weill-Engerer), stereotypes and symbols tied to the culture of so-called travellers are interwoven into a whirling carousel that makes rawness and brutality shimmer, merging belief and contradiction, freedom and confinement.
These children of the urban margins, well-acquainted with the clichés attached to their culture, sow them into a plastic vocabulary that casts a strange heaviness over the whole, a gravity that never veers into a pitiful plea. On the contrary, confinement and harshness contribute to works that each powerfully assert their independence, diffusing sentiment through a singularity that renders them autonomous; anchored in symbolism, they are never reduced to it.
The exhibition unfolds along this arc — from the fantastical fairground of Romuald Jandolo, where golden hues graft themselves onto backroom decor, where nervously etched drawings parade as ornamental motifs in a delirium of desire as ambiguous as it is generous. Bluntness and sensuality intermingle in a joyful waltz that both demands to be seen and gazed at.
At the opposite end, Charly Bechaimont’s naked body is subjected to substances and fluids whose harshness and toxicity push it to the edge. A physical experience of marginality, it brings the organic into contact with machine debris and synthetic materials, forming a mechanical landscape where humanity endures more than it lives. Suspended from punching bag gantries, five car hoods display grotesque swellings whose origins can be imagined — a manifest revenge, an outpouring of accumulated frustration released onto something that can withstand, perhaps even undo, its explosive violence. From Francis Bacon to Rocky , from Christine to Berlinde De Bruyckere’s animal-like suspensions, this striking piece silently explores the logic of collision that binds organic and mechanical, reminding us that behind the spectacle of their confrontation lies an essential inseparability — arm, body, motion, chain, and metal feeding off each other’s gestures and material.
Acting like a magnetic center between these two poles, Rudy Dumas’ work holds a delicate balance at the edge of reality and embraces a more narrative, allegorical path. By combining disparate elements — from children’s figurines to construction lights, plaster to staples — he invents pieces that blend inside and outside. The nail becomes a tooth, the staple scrawls imaginative wanderings on the walls, a light tube sketches an impossible rollercoaster. The intimacy of the dream is worn down by the roughness of objects fated to bear the world’s wear and tear.
Carrying along imaginaries — from exoticist reductions to threatening fantasies of a marginal humanity whose uniqueness (and diversity) has long fed the myth of a unified identity forged against a common threat — the three artists powerfully unravel the illusion of essential otherness. They each bring their own approach to bear on a multiplicity of stories and mythologies.
The exhibition proposes a dialectic of confrontation, ultimately moving beyond any communitarian impulse and demonstrating, in action, that every work, every act of creation contributes to the reconstruction of a self that no king, no society, can ever reduce to a mere subject.
Les rois morts, Charly Bechaimont, Rudy Dumas et Romuald Jandolo, Suzanne Tarasieve gallery, July 05 — August 02 2025
