Through gestures that are at once simple, minimal, and spectacular, Jesse Darling’s sculptures and installations (winner of the Turner Prize in 2023) reveal the hidden narratives haunting the objects, materials, and forms that populate our daily lives. Working primarily with industrial materials, used objects, and discarded items collected around the places where he exhibits, he assembles them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics, or fantastical landscapes, emphasizing the marks left by time on their physical condition—somewhere between exhaustion and decay—as if to underscore their fragility and precariousness.
His new work, conceived for the grande Verrière du Palais de Tokyo, invites visitors to enter an imposing landscape of illegible posters and advertising signs, populated by a ghostly crowd of lecterns topped with flags that alternately flutter in the wind. Here, these symbols of power are altered, erased, and rendered inaudible, as if caught in an ongoing process of deterioration or derealization. Tinged with a form of critical melancholy, this work connects us with the moving precariousness of the material world around us, as well as that of the systems of production, consumption, and domination that made it possible. This poetic recycling of reality resembles an act of disarmament, momentarily holding violence at a distance in order to better neutralize it. The title of the work, referring to a painting by Hans Holbein le Jeune, alludes to Renaissance vanitas paintings, which allegorically depicted the fragility of human life and the vanity of symbols of power, culture, and progress. In the same way, these material fossils, eroded by History, convey the exhaustion of dominant narratives challenged by the necessary renewal of values in a damaged world. Through a useful disorder—in the literal sense of “undoing an order”—he proposes a form of resistance to the norms of a productivist world.
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Source: paris.fr — photo: Tom Carter