Project room : Theo Michael — Arthropodos — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 10 → April 22, 2017

The basic argument of the show is a reaction to the following question: What if everything we do leads to death and extinction?

Since this question seems to be plausible and impossible to refute, then maybe everything is futile, including all art and politics and all the conversations you ever had and everything else we admire and consider worthy. Should we be reconsidering our criteria and values? Is there something that should be done about this or is extinction an unavoidable fate? Should we care about the little things or anything at all? Should we oppose “progress” and live like ants in communist arrangements or should we go all out and colonize the universe like the great aggressive mutation of matter that we are (consuming all resources in the way)? Being agnostic about these questions is what stimulates the production of the works in this show.

Sans titre, 0 Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris et Courtesy Galerie OMR, Mexico

The obsessive drawings depict articulated and overlapping landscapes that are devoid of human figures but intelligent forces are implied. The artificial and the natural are merged and are now inhabited by 2D creatures that seem to have been installed there by a troglodyte that defaced the carefully rendered drawing. These hideous creatures analyze and critique their predicament and their reality. Some of these creatures are insects. It is appropriate that after all is said and done mankind is judged by arthropods, the very creatures that men thought of as disgusting, brainless without conscience and ok to be mass exterminated.

In this show the Theo Michael’s first ever large scale sculpture will be presented. It is a precarious arrangement of primitive and archetypal forms. Explicit semblances are avoided, but one could discern organic forms like worms or molecular structures, ice cream balls, phallic undertones and fecal matter or just some plain old fashioned modernist formal investigation. The argumentation that drives the work comes in the form of patina, paint layers that reveal previous paint jobs and a reluctantly vandalized surface that reveals an artificial history of changing one’s mind, complex ownership, uncertainty about creative decisions and what it feels to be a sculpture. A few smaller sculptures on a table are the product of extensive reworking of scraps from older works. Various non traditional sculpture materials have been used among them a pulp made out of the studios paper and plastic rubbish. Layers of different materials unorthodoxly used, make for a geological feel. Life is just complex matter and even the most artificial polymer plastics are made of stardust just like us.

Theo Michael, Quantum Criticality, 2016 Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris et Courtesy Galerie OMR, Mexico

In a Post Humanist manner, the artist assumes the perspective of other life or artificial intelligence or a Master Simulator. In his construct there is no politics, no logic, no good and evil, no art but only materials and their combinations the only universal code. This viewpoint places human activity on an equal level with insects, rocks or viruses. We need to escape humanity in order to clearly see what we are doing. Finally only a non human can critique a human. And then maybe we can understand.