Oh de Laval — Christie’s, Londres
In a universe of luxury, joy, and blood, Oh de Laval (born in 1990) develops a pictorial work that is both free and exciting, where terrors, pleasures, and pains feast together on good taste. Cinema, and particularly dark films, nourishes this imaginary world where the peak of violence constitutes the starting point of a possible adventure, that of painting.
Featured in the highly exciting auction We Are the Future at Christie’s London curated by Marisa Bellini, Oh de Laval exhibits a canvas of outrageous expressiveness, The depth of your love today is the depth of your wound tomorrow, where a woman’s body is torn apart by a wolf in front of an eager spectator, crying and laughing, nestled at the top of a bourgeois estate. Distorted, the perspective elevates this killing into the foreground as if a sacrifice had been carried out on an altar, in view of an invisible crowd of spectators standing exactly where the observer himself stands, making him a part of it. A straight line, as if the end of the relationship between this woman and the man overseeing the ceremony were converging and, reading the title, as if love inevitably emerged from tragedy.
A terrible and exquisite gateway into the world of Oh de Laval where everything is excessive; engines roar, bodies burst, tongues lick, buttocks, breasts, lips, and sexes are worn as ostentatious accessories of beauty, until the end. Small and great deaths intertwine in a groan: “Oh,” that of shock, that of astonishment, that of pleasure, and that which the artist has made her first name.
Born in Warsaw, she lives in London before settling in Paris where she exhibits notably, as a guest artist at Galerie Marguo in 2022 and 2023. After studying industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she moved on to sociology, where she deepened her passion for Emile Durkheim. Starting as a street artist, where she took her alias, she came later to painting and sculpting. A plural path that illustrates the diversity of her references, from Francis Bacon to George Condo, from Flemish painting to pompier romanticism, all accompanied by ostentatious signs of pop culture from the 1980s to the present day.
Her painting reinvents bold stories, crises of terror, of happiness where pleasures and dangers combine. If they were initially part of a diversion of art history, her works have acquired greater independence and personality. Like the women who inhabit her paintings, central to her fictions; heroines longing for freedom, victims of male savagery, dominant and delirious desires, the kaleidoscope varies according to the infinity of faces and postures they are assuming in the social body. Social hierarchy, class contempt, and omnipotence act as fertile dynamics for the expression of limit experiences that the artist does not necessarily separate from life. Mischievously posing alongside her paintings and participating in their lives on social media, the artist gives of her image to merge with these characters and assume the unconscious part of this art. An art that is no longer limited to the studio and blends with the streams of images to which she offers a mirror that looks like a nightmare trap. By saturating the pictorial space with signs of horror, she conjures nihilism by placing it at the forefront of her tale of excess. How far can the desire for the other, for their body, and even for their life be satisfied?
Not surprisingly then, foods, drinks, blood, and viscera mingle in insane banquets. A feverish waltz of happiness and vice that translates into the motif of the circle, recurring in her work and structuring many of her compositions. The virtuous circle of vice, in a way. Emotions come and go to suspend meaning and maintain an ambiguity that feeds on itself. Perspectives, demolished by the emergence of a form betraying a major affect, twist at the whim of the depicted subjects.
Oh de Laval plays with the grotesque to work on contrasts and introduces a greater part of realism. She brings fiction out of its abstract dimension to offer it the framework of a normalcy that could well falter. These feverish looks, these taunting impulses, these deconstructed faces emancipate themselves from temporality to syncretize into a single vision. The grimace, polymorphic and polysemic, becomes the center of the composition; around its curves stretch the senses and feelings to be deciphered.
It is precisely here that Oh de Laval manages to overturn her world; beyond the chic and shocking glamor, a real attention to composition disrupts our reality by establishing within it magnetic poles that definitively derail it and reveal its countless dead ends. We then read this Durkheimian “deviance” that fascinates her.
Beyond the poisonous seduction of her act, the staging of a violence peculiar to each person that contributes to the construction of an identity makes perfect sense in the dimension of secrecy and hiddenness that simmers beneath each of her paintings. For these isolated stories, unfolded like an intimate drama, ultimately resonate with the same terrible voice.
Each of her creation extends the echo of the ultimate and ontological drama of deviance; the drift of individuals and everyone’s resistance to forming society. This threat of an impossible solidarity, ultimately, which wells up and overflows contemporary representations of successful life to accommodate the highlight of the show; its end in fanfare and ecstasy, hers or that of the other.
