Conrad Bakker — Untitled Project: La Chocolaterie — Analix Forever Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 3 → November 4, 2021

Would you like some chocolate — Swiss of course? 
 
For over twenty years, *Conrad Bakker* has been making carved and painted artworks as “Untitled Projects”: whether it be Proust-ian in the form of memes on cellphones, record albums from the 1960s and 1970s, all of the books from Robert Smithson’s personal library, paintings of Georges Perec’s “Les Choses”, the motorcycle from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Henry David Thoreau’s cabin … all of these “things“ are reproduced, usually life-size, in carved wood, and painted, by the artist. Realistic but never hyperrealistic, poetic and critical, the objects shaped by the artist are seductive but simultaneously question the expectations we have of “things” and their artifices. 
 
At Analix Forever gallery with which the artist has now worked for more than fifteen years, Conrad Bakker presents, from September 3rd, 2021, *“Untitled Project: La Chocolaterie“*, a shop selling Swiss chocolate in the front, and a studio/factory production line in the back, thus representing both the selling of one of the emblematic consumer products of Switzerland along with the labor necessary for its production. The studio/factory is a simulation of Bakker’s own studio, where the artist, alone, manually, slowly, respectfully, produces his art works, his own “products“ — i.e., our chocolate bars. Indeed, beyond the product, this artwork focuses on the economic and social construction of productivity and the labor of our hands, along with the mechanisms and relations of Western society to objects/subjects. Conrad Bakker’s “Untitled Projects” are an ongoing, fundamental reflection on the ecology of the production of consumer goods. 
 
On Saturday, September 4, at 5pm, Art historian *Paul Ardenne* will hold a special conversation with artist *Conrad Bakker* inside “Untitled Project: La Chocolaterie”, on the subjects of chocolate, art, commodities, and production.