Paranoïa déambulatoire — Olivier Robert Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 1, 2012 → January 12, 2013

Everything leads to believe there is, in this unrestrained global walk, a pathological dimension, sort of semiconscious convulsion that drives us towards an unknown destination. Indeed, there is the attraction of the journey, the discovery of the unknown, the necessity of progress, the benefactress breakthrough. But the adventure loses its charm when, lost, we are constrained to pursue a forced deambulation.

Towards this generalized “deambulatory paranoia”, some artists have decided to show a tacit resistance, an act of renunciation shaped as a stop. Neither sit-in nor immobilism, even less a denial to move on, but the shared will to pause in the history. Take the time, suddenly to realize. This is how Frédéric Nauczyciel takes advantage from this pose to immortalize this historical protest movement magnified by the grace of an unmoving dance. Or how Dennis Rudolph imposes us the silence of a scrutineer past. An inside trouble similar to the one raised by Boogie at the surface of his work, trying to capture these demons.

Pierre Petit, meanwhile, materializes this interruption as a rupture. It is “while singin ” that we enter life, “while singing” that one imprison itself. Metaphor of gran tenacity, genuine sculptural electroshock.

Thus, when Michael Bilsborough and Asger Carlsen reintroduce the movement, we imagine the machine starting again in its mad pursuit. If however race there is, it is circular, confused, disoriented. The first one’s orgiastic bodies balance from pleasure to disgust, and the delicate drawing, anatomy of the soul, connects our contemporary decadences to the glorious hours of a fantasized Antiquity. As for the second, he invades our daily life, where he makes this strangeness reappear from. It is not so much the flesh that hybridizes itself, as much as the vision of a society gnawed by this deambulatory paranoia.

Reckless child’s game, inebriating waltz, shamanic trance: you simply have to think that the world turns continuously on its axis to understand how it can easily taint itself. When the artist decides to break this whirling, active inaction, it is suddenly the world that starts to spin around him.

With this gesture, he reveals an incomprehensible perpetual agitation; he asserts, supreme alternative: walk or create.

A proposition from Benjamin Bianciotto