Ai Weiwei — Galerie Max Hetzler
At the Max Hetzler Gallery, Ai Weiwei soberly returns to his artistic associations articulating the history of art, the present of societies, aesthetic geographies and the alienation of freedoms through some twenty new pieces that are still loaded with a deep meaning.
Ai Weiwei — Marbre, Porcelaine, Lego @ Max Hetzler Gallery from June 12 to August 7, 2021. Learn more Using Lego bricks, Ai Weiwei alternates between the Saudi Arabian flag and the reproduction of a photograph of the artist staging himself after the iconic image of the remains of a child washed up on the beach in his flight from a land at war. Two forms of eruption of local realities erected by globalized communication into immediately identifiable global symbols whose ramifications are constantly developing. If the use of the Lego brick, another element that has become part of a universal vocabulary mobilizes the artist’s attraction for the accumulation of reduced elements to represent monumentality, he is once again the vector of a strategy of repeating creation through a form of questioning of its reproduction. Ai Weiwei manages, as always, to condense the present into many fragments which say a lot about its fragility.
A fragility at work in the multitude of threats hanging over the candidates for exile, immortalized here on equally delicate supports, the vases and plates made in the style of porcelain from the Ming period. In frescoes that borrow as much from the East as from the West, Ai Weiwei depicts this human way through cultures of rejection. Between the territorial conflicts that lead to exile and the threats of protective forces that have become ramparts against their own humanity, the place of justice is lost in a continuous questioning, the answers to which have yet to be invented. A careful reinterpretation, simple as child’s play and solemn as the story of a civilization, of personal epics often veering into the universality of tragedy.
If there is obviously an abrupt side marked by a form of pathos, the subject can hardly call the nuance once the gaze is lined alongside those who make this crossing and, behind the frontality of his use of symbolic icons, Ai Weiwei also knows how to reactivate the figure of the artist as a witness, chronicler of his time immortalizing on the modes of expression in his hand. Here the vases, as one might have arranged for amphorae in Antiquity, a present engraved in time resembling a mythical epic. Not to speak of classic tragedy, so much the journeys of the Seawatch, ship coming to the aid of migrants, materialized by the sinuosities of repeated lines on a deep blue background, resemble the eternal recommencing of Sisyphus’s charge.
As a counterpoint to this main room of the exhibition, whose generosity and simplicity demonstrate a real search for a definitively disturbed world order, the luxury and the gilding of the wallpaper in a small room repeat in the stylizing patterns to the glory of video surveillance. Between the opulence of emerged lands whose constructions are increasing in proportion to the number of immigrant workers who died on the construction sites, the crazy race of the greatest fortunes in the world devoting a pharaonic budget to their protection and the governments concentrating the bulk of their public policies on the development of tools for monitoring their population, the sum of the targets of the sumptuous irony of these motifs inspired by the world of luxury is drowning in repetition. Resuming its marble reproduction process, the roll of toilet paper, whose destiny during the first weeks of the pandemic made it an object of acute envy, puts an end to this parody of a luxury incarcerated in its own golden prison, which surreptitiously widens, through the lenses of a multiplied camera like a flower without a petal, to all sections of our societies.
Grasping with malice and generosity the serious questions of life and death which entire populations are confronted with every day, pointing out with an angry irony the dead ends of a society of surveillance as well as of withdrawal into oneself, Ai Weiwei poses with Marble, porcelaine , Lego the framework of an even broader reflection which brings into play his role as an artist. On the front line to receive criticism that sees it only as a form of opportunism, he nevertheless courageously accepts the challenge of an indisputable affront to reason.
Thus even if the question of its scope can legitimately be asked, its involvement and its mediation, by a constant balance between the frontality of a “hot” subject and the fragile tension between historical objects that have become symbols of luxury, testify to an art in action which never ceases to struggle with its own suspension, with its own change.
