Through gestures that are at once simple, minimal and spectacular, the sculptures of Jesse Darling reveal the hidden narratives that haunt the objects, materials, and forms that populate our daily lives. Working primarily with industrial materials, used objects and discarded objects found in the surrounding areas where he exhibits, he assembles them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics and fantastical landscapes, emphasizing the marks of time on their physical condition—between exhaustion and decay—as if to underscore their fragility and precariousness.
His new site specific production for the Grande Verrière of the Palais de Tokyo invites viewers into an impressive landscape of posters and advertisements rendered illegible, inhabited by a ghostly crowd of lecterns topped with flags fluttering in the wind. These symbols of power are altered, erased, rendered inaudible, as if caught in an ongoing process of decay or derealization.
Tinted with a form of critical melancholy, this work connects us to the poignant precariousness of the material world around us, as well as to the fragility of the systems of production, consumption and domination that made it possible. This poetic recycling of reality is akin to disarmament, momentarily distancing violence to better neutralize it.
The title of the work, which references a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, alludes to Renaissance vanitas paintings, which allegorically represented the fragility of human life and the futility of symbols of power, culture and progress. Similarly, these physical fossils, ravaged by history, speak to the weariness of dominant narratives, which are challenged by the necessary renewal of values in a damaged world. It is through a “useful disorder”—in the literal sense of “undoing an order”—that he offers resistance to the norms of a productivist world.
Curators: Guillaume Désanges, assisted by Sonia Recasens and Léna Kemiche.
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