Les Innommables grotesques — L MD Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 29 → November 19, 2011

“All those things have fallen, all the things that stick out, with my eyes, my hair, without leaving a trace, fallen so far, so deep, that I heard nothing, perhaps are falling still, my hair slowly like soot still, of the fall of my ears heard nothing.”¹

Since the discovery in the XVth century of the unpredictable frescoes of the Golden House of Néron under the thermal baths of Trajan, the grotesque (of the Latin grutta, cave) has manifested through the ages. It proliferates in the brilliant enormity of a Gargantua, in the hybrid and unbridled characters of a picture of Bosch, or a satiric monster of Goya, a grotesque Nose of Gogol, a scandalous masquerade by Ensor, a parodied deformity by Daumier, the hallucinations of Kafka’s metamorphosis, the subterranean alienation of a Dostoïevsky hero, or the incoherent discourse of a bald soprano …

The grotesque manifests in binaries, which evoke laughter in dismay, proliferation in the face of dissolution, exuberance within alienation. From an anthropological point of view, it is an existential experience, which " aims at exorcising chaos or rather the risk of chaos within each new moment to understand its order "². With the effect of the uncanny, the grotesque gives a parallel and deformed vision of reality in order to reveal through the individual, a collective vision: the ever vertigo inducing connection to a world, itself grotesque, chaotic and in full mutation.

The artists of the exhibition cultivate this duel game of humor and carnage. They accumulate, stack, and assemble, drawing from the collective imagination. This skewing of forms, objects and aesthetic codes towards something strange but familiar allows them to investigate and instigate a dialogue with reality, bringing up these double standards, the underlying conflicts, the empty illusions and the instability of the ideals.

¹ Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, London, Calder & Boyars, 1958/1975, p. 21

² Rémi Astruc, Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle. Essai d’anthropologie littéraire, Paris, Editions Classiques Garnier, coll. « Perspectives comparatistes », 2010, p. 103.