Alex Da Corte — Night Chat- exposition prolongée — Olivier Robert Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → March 10, 2012

For his first solo exhibition in France, Alex Da Corte presents new work inspired by ‘Halloween ‘, John Carpenter’s 1979 horror classic, the story of The Shape who stalks babysitters in Haddonfield, Illinois.

" In a way it is modeled after the traditional hero quest story, an Odyssey, a man searching for a purpose, a love and ready to fight to survive"

Da Corte

The Shape, a character with a masked face, who wanders the neighborhood on Halloween, embodies the spirit of the night. In each of the works presented, in photographs or collaged objects, Alex Da Corte deconstructs this immaterial spirit, mapping his path which roams from one house to another, observing people and their conversation, untangling the thread of communication that moves between them. His works peel back the skins of these conversations and dissect what remains of them in the light of day.

The objects installed in the gallery space form a painter’s composition, a tableau vivante. They are displayed like artifacts taken from the scene of a crime, like props from a film. The objects, in colors of orange, silver, and lavender blue, are set in front of a billboard size image of a woman, reminiscent of Brancusi’s St. Theresa. There are deflated basketballs scattered about the ground, stabbed with knives or filled with hair conditioner.

In this way, Alex Da Corte bursts the iconography of sport, of horror films and art history, collects their shells, emptied of their substance or their symbolism, to display them on the ground, not as relics, but as objects waiting for new terrors.

Alex Da Corte (b.1981) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2010. Da Corte has shown widely in the US and abroad, most recently in the ICA Philadelphia, as part of “How We Escaped: Reflections on Warhol.”