After Paris Art Week, which, much like the city’s fashion weeks, involves a complete onslaught of events, I felt like I needed to spend the next few days floating in a sensory deprivation tank. This year, hundreds of galleries set up stalls at three simultaneous fairs. On one end of the spectrum was Art Basel at the Grand Palais for the most established exhibitors, and on the opposite end, NADA, the new edition to Paris Art Week, where galleries mixed with modelling agencies and concept clothing stores that want to be associated with the art world.
And then my main destination, Paris Internationale, the nomadic free fair started a decade ago by five younger galleries as an alternative to more established players (although it also includes long-standing French galleries like Hussenot). Alongside the fairs, several of the most important Paris institutions and galleries opened new exhibitions, with as many as six openings at the Palais de Tokyo alone and a huge solo show by American artist Martine Syms at Lafayette Anticipations. In other words, there was plenty to do during three days of cramming.
Late to the party, I arrived in Paris on Friday morning and went straight from the airport to Lafayette Anticipations, where I literally stepped into the art. In the entrance hall, the whole floor is covered with pixelated mobile phone pictures of plants and details from party photos; long fingers with fake nails curling around a champagne flute are cut and pasted together with children’s pictures. Everything becomes a mess of white lines, arrows, and handwritten words. On the wall, a huge patched-up print with more drawings and scribbles stretches up through the building. I didn’t understand what was going on and took the lift to the third floor to what I later understood was supposed be the climax of the exhibition, but which, for me, became the entrance.
The room is designed as an austere control room with eight screens on one wall and another six placed on a table in front of four office chairs. The screens display images from surveillance cameras placed in different parts of the museum. From this surveillance centre, visitors can both play God and be reduced to pawns in the game as they look at other stupid visitors scurrying around the museum shop, mountains of cardboard boxes from the Foundation Galeries Lafayette’s various storage areas, and images of themselves looking at the screens in the room.
Downstairs, Syms shows TikTok videos on screens set on edge like giant smartphones. Over Radiohead-style emo music, she recounts her life through clickbait narratives that follow the app’s classic confessional format: “then something happened – like for part 2.” Screenshots of Kermit the Frog, videos of the artist smoking a bong, pictures of antidepressants, and the text “And I was still depressed :( ” show how many people today voluntarily expose the innermost rooms of their lives to the inspection of the outside world. The installation becomes an extension of the surveillance agency.
As I moved on, I was met by long rows of merch and realised that the museum shop I saw in the security footage is part of Syms’s installation. Between the fitting rooms, set designs, tote bags, meditation videos, internet clips, and ugly prefabricated chairs, the exhibition begins to stretch and fall apart. There are too many ideas competing in the same arena, and the same thing is repeated over and over again, which means that no single object manages to be effective. The idea of “exhibition-as-store-as-critique-of-capitalism” is neither new nor exciting. It’s already been done better by artists like Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Kruger, Keith Haring, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Tracey Emin. The exhibition’s more exciting arc is about the artist’s game of watching or being watched, inside or outside, using sets and screens that the audience can move behind, in front of, and around.
My next stop was Paris Internationale, which since 2022 has been housed in the old telephone exchange on Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, a wonderful old turn-of-the-century building stripped down to just bricks, concrete, and iron reinforcements. If Syms flirts with the 90s, Paris Internationale was characterised by a similar refreshing nonchalance towards finishes and completed objects. I saw several examples of artists playing with assemblage techniques that nod back to Karen Kilimnik or Laurie Parson’s use of everyday scraps to create a kind of non-artwork.
At the New York gallery King’s Leap, Russian artist Sveta Mordovskaya showed a messy sculpture collage consisting of a folding chair taped together with a bunch of pictures, some lint, feathers, a doll, a hanger, and a bunch of plastic bags. At trendy Mexico City-founded and now LA-based House of Gaga, Josef Strau showed a number of shining floor sculptures made of clay, tangled cables, old light fittings, and deformed grids.
I didn’t see much of the abstract painting and fancy table sculptures that usually dominate fairs as I moved around the unconventional fir design where walls were placed diagonally instead of creating small boxes for each gallery. When I did come across it, it felt outdated and insensitive among the other artists who seemed to prefer to work with found objects and cheap techniques.
Perhaps the desire to work with recycled materials is a symptom of austerity, or maybe it’s about noble sustainability ambitions? Either way, the slacker art montage is an effective method of both referencing and twisting reality. As in the Antwerp gallery Sofie van de Velde’s presentation of Amber Andrews’s piles of neatly folded shirts that become an eerily sweet Surrealist sculpture with feet and multiple cat faces. A pedestal has been dressed in hair extensions to create another small beast.
The duo Women’s History Museum (Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan) was presented at Paris Internationale by New York’s Company Gallery. Assemblage is an exercise in form, mastering the messy material to create vibrant objects that don’t just feel like shabby readymades. Some succeed better than others. The Oslo gallery Femtensesse showed a series of performances by Marthe Ramm Fortun tied to an installation that landed towards the wrong end of the messiness scale; viewers were plunged into a chaotic and incomprehensible sea of mixed media with iron, clay, photographs, paper, and found materials.
One of my absolute favourites, Rebecca Ackroyd of Peres Projects, managed to use a few select symbols to create a presentation that both connects to reality and repels it. Plastic legs with fishnet stockings have been put on bar stools or screwed onto a ventilation pipe. On the back of the pipe is a small photo of a woman being attacked by a man, who bites her neck; a silver cast of a fish jaw acts as a frame. It is menacingly erotic, but it is unclear where the threat comes from. The net clad legs are reminiscent of scales – perhaps the monster jaw belongs to the sexy legs?
Another connecting theme was artists playing with textiles and flirting with the world of fashion. Galleri Sperlings presented Malte Zense’s sculpture made of old clothes, and at Jan Kaps, Kresiah Mukwazhi created works made up of rows of bra straps on canvas. Others entered into a more direct dialogue with identity-creating luxury consumption in presentations reminiscent of Isa Genzken or Bernadette Corporation. In Company Gallery’s booth, the Women’s History Museum showed two mannequins attached to each other through a dress, while a fashion show played on a TV on high heels placed on the floor. These were interspersed with Sixten Sandra Östberg’s photorealistic paintings of women in leopard tights or biker boots and Troy Montes Michie’s photo collages. In Sweetwater’s sparse duo presentation with Marina Grize and Kayode Ojo, designer perfumes, watches, and cameras were displayed on floating mirror shelves alongside photography, a medium that made a comeback at the fair along with the 90s craze.
For those not content to look back only a few decades, a number of presentations felt downright medieval. The more successful paintings at the fair were figurative, depicting figures with long Mannerist faces in muted compositions moving through various dark fantasy landscapes. Paris-based gallery Lo Brutto Stahl showed Georgian painter Tornike Robakidze, whose paintings depict devils, skeletons, and other ghostly figures. In another booth, the duo Asma (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá) fitted small paintings of slender and elongated figures into super-slim hand-carved frames.
If Paris Art Week had anything to tell us about the future of art, it was that we are moving away from the didactically political, the academic, and the documentary in favour of art that experiments with form and opens up to the viewer’s associations. Both the 90s assemblages and medieval paintings harbour the same refusal to portray reality as it is; instead, they are about distorting or creating skewed dreamscapes where the impossible can take place. Despite the dismissal of reality, anchors were thrown into our world, either through found materials or figurative portrayals – a kind of surreal style of representation that reflects a feeling that nothing in the world is what it really appears to be.
