XEROX — Matthew Darbyshire — Jousse Entreprise — Art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 13 → May 13, 2017

Here appeared out of the darkness, suddenly and in increasingly greater number, DOUBLES, MANNEQUINS, AUTOMATONS, HOMUNCULI.
 
Replica, duplicate, clone, twin, facsimile, model, doppelgänger, dummy, surrogate. How many ways to say the same? A surfeit of terms for the duplicate, triplicate — multiple — and so — and on — ad infinitum. Imitation, impostor, mimic, mime, echo, fake, ersatz. How many ways, and why, to say the same, but different; for better and/or for worse? 

The Darbyshire’s sculptures explore the complexities of replication, and the rich possibilities therein, they are also studies of repetition — reversion, inversion, perversion. Compulsive attention to serial repetition, embedded in the artist’s process, highlights the structural and aesthetic distinctions of each new object. As the objects inexorably repeat their altered forms, tensely suspended between the digitally printed and the handmade, they give rise to the freedom of obsessionality as a form of company that departs from the exact to embrace skill, craft and the ardently belaboured. Immaculately ordered filth, carefully contained extrusions are frozen mid-coagulate, as if at the heart of the heart — beating or no — is the hopeful truth of repetition: it brings into being that which otherwise passes unseen.
 
— Extract of the text of Emily LaBarge