Despite having studied cinema, animation and video, Paul Gondry always comes back to graphic arts. A question that haunts every film-maker’s painting is: what is the need for leaving the moving image to one side, at least temporarily, for paint? Why prefer painting—the art of the fixed image, made of poor material and which has hardly changed over centuries—to the art of modernity that is film, with the continuity of its twenty-four images per second, sound, light and movement? Not that cinema surpasses painting, but when you make, as Paul Gondry does, clips, short films or video games such as role-playing games, what more can painting offer?

The answer is in the medium’s very nature, its artificiality being the best means of translating the visions the artist seeks to display. Painting is a must when suggestion takes precedence over narration, apparitions over incarnations, fantasy over reality. Paul Gondry’s painting is not merely about set images. Rich in details, textures and lights, it installs an atmosphere and retains a specific, haunted moment. It precipitates, focuses and emblematises. More than a picture, it is about seeking the “image’s feeling,” says the painter.

The artist likes to describe his painting as a receptacle, a tomb, a manuscript. It is the opposite of film, its residual shimmering, what survives once the screen and the light have been turned off. His painting plunges all the deeper into darkness and formlessness, from which springs the unknown, even the monstrous. His drawings search through the depths of the human psyche, examining its fantasies, illusions and dreams. It brings out images shaped by the universal unconscious, on the edge of fantasy and nightmare. Shadows, silhouettes and profiles cross the frame, as if returning from the depths and margins: they portray ghosts, elderly children, hieratic magicians or celebrants of a nocturnal ritual. This dark, almost sticky, universe is reminiscent of some of F. W. Murnau’s visions or scenes from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. This world is also very Lynchian in its atmospheres and intrigues, flirting with Eraserhead(1977) or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).

All painting, at least when informed, also incessantly crosses the infinite territories of art history and the works of the past. In Paul Gondry’s painting, such dialogues can be perceived, changing from one canvas to the next: we recognise the Nabis is some of the colour arrangements, Edvard Munch in the distorted figures, and the Surrealist painters in the chimerical visions encased in a symbolic system. Watching films by Paul Gondry, connections can also be made with the contemporary artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

His pictorial practice, which he started aged twelve, extending to comics and graphic novels, developed like an obvious path, a natural inclination. Today, this fully embraced painterly practice follows a set process: it often begins with flat areas of colour on a linen canvas in order to master the texture, then it gradually lets the drawing emerge through numerous layers of paint. Some series are based on a collage of various photographic material, reworked beyond recognition. Painting, carried out in the domestic space, surrounded by personal objects, is a solitary activity that fosters an intimate relationship with the medium: time stands still, it is “mummified,” and a personal feeling is extracted out of it.

Metamorphosis is a crucial motif in this painting: the transformation of bodies and nature, transmutation of matter, slow fading towards death. The colours contribute to this feeling. To quote Edward James about Leonora Carrington, it is as if they “have materialised in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.” At the bottom of his alchemical crucible, Paul Gondry constructs his palette with bold, acidic montages, at the risk of dissonance: cooked and re-cooked reds, the colour of dried blood, sooty blacks, but also the somewhat supernatural light blues and greens of the aurora borealis. Colour does not describe the object; it projects the symbolic qualities and contributes to the internal balance of the composition. By so doing, Paul Gondry leans towards Symbolism, but of an esoteric kind. The picture is deciphered like a secret grimoire. Midnight suns and Van Gogh-styled starry nights make up the sky in Paul Gondry’s scenes, which are impossible to place— day interior? night exterior? The whole thing is theatrically set up, lit up by artificial lights.

Unlike cinema, where images follow each other, painting can combine several pictures in one, becoming a fixed panorama where characters and new stories coexist, like many threads towards possible narratives. Some of Paul Gondry’s compositions are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s kaleidoscopic paintings, which must be explored slowly to be understood.

In some places, a wealth of details evoke the Orientalists’ ornamental trend, as in Gustave Moreau’s works: wrought-iron gates and other minutely worked, but never common, motifs. Paul Gondry transports his subjects into fictional spaces out of time. The pictures are inhabited by masked creatures, either naked or dressed with large togas. An elongated presence in the water inevitably brings to mind the iconography of Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites. The pictorial treatment varies depending on the area: passages with myriad details are juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds, which provide projection surfaces for the viewer. Figures emerge from this substance as if on the screen of a silent film, undergoing transformations, in states of limbo.

The name of the artist-run space Paul Gondry has co-founded in New York, 15 Orient, reveals his taste for esotericism, which he shares with the Surrealists and Leonora Carrington. Some titles—such as Nigredo, an alchemical term referring to the phase of putrefaction, calcination and decomposition, the first step towards the philosopher’s stone—leave room for doubt as to his possible initiation. The artworks themselves also maintain ambiguity and resist any unequivocal interpretation. They have tipped over into the occult, where secrecy is the order of the day and words are superfluous.

Laetitia Chauvin

Since the mid 2000s, Helene Appel paints, as faithfully as possible, with consummate skill, all manner of subjects—big and small, beautiful and ugly, organic and inorganic. She imparts a real presence to the life-sized subjects she paints on raw linen canvas. The formats and techniques she uses for each painting are dictated by the subjects themselves.
Embracing even the most trivial details, her works put forward a vision stripped to its essentials and far removed from any moral or metaphysical interpretation. The unvarnished truth of everyday objects is captured with unrelenting realism, preserving the perfection of the moment. There is no attempt to manipulate the eye in a trompe-l’oeil manner, instead our gaze is encouraged to seek out the inherent aesthetic qualities of envelopes, car headlights, a sewer grate, soapy water, … The apparent simplicity of bringing to life these objects through painting, opens the door to the most profound exploration of the relationship between art and reality. Or to put it more simply: “What you see is what you get… but take a better look at what you see.” To arrive at this point: don’t be satisfied with merely representing reality, create it.

Helene Appel is a graduate of the Hamburg School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Based in Berlin, her work has been exhibited at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, at the Drawing Room and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, at the Städtische Galerie in Delmenhorst and at the Thalie Foundation in Brussels. Her paintings feature in numerous public and private collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece, La Gaia in Italy, the Olbricht Collection in Germany and at Touchstones, Rochdale in the UK. She is represented by the galleries The Approach in London, P420 in Bologna and Rüdiger Schottle in Munich.

Paperclips, ropes, envelopes, notepads, whistles, keys, locks and mirrors are some of the things in our world that Anne Neukamp has attempted to represent in her paintings. For her, the representational activity is not driven by an aim for realism. Instead, her purpose is purely semiologic: this is about creating the symbol of a paperclip, a whistle, a lock or a mirror, that is, an image the representational ability of which is reduced to the bare minimum.

In the exhibition “Mirror,” the artist presents about ten new paintings that show, over unstable backgrounds made with tempera and oil, pictograms of various kinds of mirrors: some are set up on a stand (Announcement; Tilt; Sprout), other are double pieces (Duplopia; Revision; Together), while others are broken (Incident; Fall; View). The mirror, whether the real object or its image, has been a topic of interest for many artists in different ways. With Magritte, many mirrors (The False Mirror, 1928; Not to be Reproduced, 1937) do not reflect the world as they should, as if the specular item did not work. As for Gerhard Richter’s Spiegel (1981 onwards), mirrors purchased to be converted into substitutes for paintings, bear witness to a desire to be present in the immediate world, to an art that is keen not to ignore the space it takes any longer. Since 1962, with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadri specchianti, which blend painted images with reflections, the mirror has been presented as a potential ersatz painting. When looking at Anne Neukamp’s pictures, one thinks nevertheless more of other mirrors, namely those in Roy Lichtenstein’s series Mirrors (1969-72), which early on, and not without humour, had set Pop abstraction’s semiotic regime—the representation of an abstraction. Although Anne Neukamp’s paintings are clear descendants of Lichtenstein’s mirrors, their digital origin gives them a genuine specificity.

In the mid-1970s, the Pictures Generation artists re-used existing images in an appropriative approach. In a similar way, which could be called “Pictures 2.0”, Anne Neukamp selects on the internet—from websites such as Clipart or 3D Models, which provide ready-made drawings with simplified lines and digital symbols—generic shapes that later become the subjects of her paintings. For this new series, she has chosen pictograms of mirrors with basic shapes, sometimes even somewhat pixelated—images that might have been created by the graphic designer Susan Kare, the creator of the first Apple icons in the early 1980s. The A4 prints of these generic representations of mirrors cover a whole wall of Anne Neukamp’s studio in Berlin, while on the contiguous walls, these pictograms are enlarged and recreated on a noble linen canvas. Announcement testifies to this change of scale: the small pictogram pinned to the wall becomes the main subject of a composition measuring 2.8 metres in height and 1.6 metres in width. Similarly, the pieces of the broken mirror in Fallappear disproportionate due to the painting’s large format (2.2 m). Besides its imposing size, each mirror features formal characteristics that are just as unsettling, due to their digital origin. The extremely stylised frames around the mirrors of Property or View, adopting a pixelated shape, seem to come from the Super Mario Bros video game’s decors. As for the Siamese mirrors in Together, Revision, Adjustment and Sprout, they remind us of the specular object in some of Walt Disney’s tales. In the face of this painting and digital tool trade, we cannot help but think of some creations from the 1980s that typify the post-modern era, such as Gerwald Rockenschaub’s pictogrammatic canvases or Suzanne Treister’s paintings of video games, which display this moment when the digital image becomes the very subject of paintings.

Anne Neukamp’s mirrors make no reference to reality. The artist uses them because these objects produce images and, what’s more, representations directly and immediately created by reality. But in these paintings, the mirrors only reflect precisely that which cannot be represented: abstraction. The mirrors in Announcement and Tilt, outlined in black like a picture frame, show purely geometric abstractions, created by diagonal, parallel white and blue stripes. The same stripes, of various blues, cover the surfaces of “mirror-paintings” in Adjustment and Revision, while the shimmering surfaces of Sprout and Incident are represented by blue gradients. If we go by the semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce’s symbol classification, the sign presented by a mirror, the reflection, is a clue, if not a mega-clue since it directly shows reality. Yet here, it seems to have lost this clue-like dimension since it shows nothing from reality, neither body nor object, but abstract shapes. The mirror, too, is affected by this loss of reality, since it is nothing but a mere pictogram. It is as if Anne Neukamp’s paintings were a celebration of the icon’s revenge on the clue, or at least pointed it out.

Breuning has made a career of challenging the belief that critique and comedy do not go together. His paintings, sculptures and elaborately staged photographs satirise the more corrosive aspects of modern life, from man’s encounter with nature to the effects of technology on it, all while getting people to dress in silly costumes or show their bums. One example of his arse art is Text-Butt (2015), a cardboard cut-out of a behind with SMS text bubbles coming out of the crack. On the surface it’s a crude joke about talking out of one’s ass, or farting out messages. Deeper down, it’s about the unacknowledged effects of hyper-connectivity on the gut: the nervous effects of being always on-call. Text-Butt might even be included with a number of Breuning’s works which address the philosophical split between abstract consciousness and physical sensuousness—Descartes via the derriere. The invitation to such philosophising might also be a joke at the arrogance and pretentiousness of the art critic, who inflates the cultural significance of what is just a funny picture of a bottom.

Much of Breuning’s work explores the word-image relationship and like text-art—think Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha—draws upon signs from advertising (billboard style slogans), and popular culture (Bigfoot, animation) to, at least on one level, communicate clearly and immediately with a wide audience about existing political structures. But Breuning eschews cool conceptualism for absurdism and often vulgar joking; his word-image relationships belong more to the world of the cartoon, another mainstay of his practice.

In preferring to combine his ecological mission with entertainment and accessibility, Breuning’s work seems to align with the post-critical tendencies of the last two decades. Thinkers such as Rita Felski and Bruno Latour, have argued that critiques of ideology and language have become too elitist, self-referential and pessimistic in their problematising of ideas, forgetting pleasure and attachment, which are particularly necessary when addressing urgent problems. Latour argues that critique has had an adverse effect on environmental campaigns, by undermining the idea of universal truths or essences which have opened the way for climate change deniers to claim that the facts of global warming are social constructs, open to debate. But I don’t think anti-environmentalists are busy reading Derrida and Foucault, and in any case, wouldn’t such thinkers lead us to question the powerful interests behind their denials? Breuning’s art shows us that critique doesn’t mean sacrificing pleasure. His work is irreverent—a playful poking fun at issues, even as he rallies around them. He approaches environmental concerns with seriousness, in the sense of being important and worthy of attention, but he does not take ecological representations seriously, approaching them without the solemn reverence and unquestioning regard that seriousness implies. In short, if someone were to ask of Breuning’s funny work “is he sincere or not?” we would have to answer both “yes and no”.

The naivety of Breuning’s cartoon exaggerations ensure us of his sincerity—he truly cares and isn’t capable of duplicity. Even so, this grotesque overstatement inserts a touch of irony that pulls apart image and text, picture and message. Leave Me Alone (2024), a photograph in which Bigfoot and family stare anxiously at the camera, mid-migration, stands in for the plight of indigenous people forced out of their homes by capital extraction. Yet even as Breuning uses the pop culture figure to appeal to the viewer, the image offers a critique of a mass media more interested in a fictional avatar of early man, than in the real struggles of first nations peoples. Gasoline (2024) with its demonic red figure surrounded by flames, suggests both the damaging effects of fossil fuels and the reductive moralism which turns environmental problems into issues of good and bad consumption, encouraging a fatalistic stance that man must inevitably pay for his sins against nature.

Biblical signs recur in Wave Land (2024), a painting in which teardrop shaped rain produces huge waves threatening to engulf the land. Here Breuning nods to Arte Povera in using nature to depict nature, with his rudimentary woodblock printing circumventing industrial production. The childish images with floods of tears poke fun at the sentimentalism and infantilism of environmental imagery—think of the Keep America Beautiful adverts featuring Native Americans crying at the sight of littering—even as the work appeals to those same simple values. Then there is Sunny (2019), a video showing a young blonde boy staring into the camera, the earth in his eyes, until both planet and child start to burn up. It’s a moving scene, despite looking like an outtake from Michael Jackson’s much mocked 1995 music video Earth Song. The looped image, devoid of other narrative context, leaves unresolved whether the child is the victim or cause of planetary future destruction—does the son fly too close to the sun?—while the choice of a blonde blue eyed kid suggests the normative, heterosexist and frankly Aryan imagery of campaigns to save the planet “for future generations.” We may even ask if the formulaic, repeating image doesn’t suggest the failure of this familial cliché. So much is at stake here: not only the future of the planet, but the kind of planet we want to survive. In short, Breuning seems to tell us that the issues are too serious to be taken so seriously.

Paul Clinton

Moffat Takadiwa’s studio is situated in Mbare, a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Harare, whose informal economy is partially based on the recycling of electronic goods and the sale of second-hand products imported from Europe. Over the past ten years, he has been collecting computer keyboards, used toothbrushes, empty toothpaste tubes and pen casings, as well as bottle caps, plastic bucket handles, spoons and many other objects. More recently, belt buckles and zippers have appeared in the giant tapestries exhibited as part of Zimbabwe’s national pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

These disparate elements are given new life through the art of Moffat Takadiwa, who transforms them into sculptures and tapestries. His practice follows in the footsteps of the African artists, who from the 1980s onwards, chose to create works from almost exclusively recycled materials, in a radical break from the Western academic art which was introduced into Africa at the end of the 19th century.

For Moffat Takadiwa, the turning point came in 2015 with the protest movement “Rhodes Must Fall,”(2) which challenged the predominant Western worldview in the curricula of South African universities. This was the moment when he realized that it was time to find his own path, employing an artistic language that drew on his local socio-cultural surroundings. Using keys from computer keyboards, present in many of his works, Moffat Takadiwa began developing a “de-colonialized” vocabulary.(3) Through his multicolored mosaics, whose constituent elements are strung together with fishing line, the artist relentlessly builds connections between past and present, between the ancestral wisdom of yesterday and the urban societies of today. Each new work is a narrative that invites the viewer to contemplate the interdependence of communities across centuries and beyond geographical borders.

The circle, omnipresent in Moffat Takadiwa’s oeuvre, not only refers to a shape found in numerous everyday objects but also evokes the outlines of Great Zimbabwe, a legendary medieval city, today in ruins, but which once sat at the center of an empire that encompassed present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The aesthetic appeal of his works—which borrow motifs and colors from a variety of cultures in his country—underpins a scathing critique of the legacy of a troubled colonial past, while at the same time praising the resistance groups that fought against it.

Moffat Takadiwa’s works are akin to algorithms relentlessly producing variants of the same narrative. They methodically chart the journeys of goods that have been returned to Africa. Raw materials extracted from the continent are shipped to Europe or China, where they are used in the manufacturing process. When they finally “return to their homeland,” Moffat Takadiwa transforms them into precious objects, some of which once again make their way back to the West, destined for museums and collectors.

N’Goné Fall

I’ve placed this sculpture together with a series of recent paintings of adolescents. I observe young people in museums, or in the street, both in France and abroad. These images are snapshots of today’s world. These teenagers rarely look at each other, nor do they exchange a great deal verbally, yet they come together, almost blending into one another. Their identities merge in intense friendships, where each is the reflection of the other. The backgrounds are painted in broad strokes, they contain no details, they are pure color, as with Ingres, who I often think of. I really admire the modernity of his female figures, the care and precision given to the details of the clothing, the folds and pleats, the embroidery and even the corseting of 19th century women, I have to admit. I tried to depict the graphic lines that criss-cross the bodies of these teenagers. I tried different ways of framing the figures and various points of view, from both above and below. The colors are drawn from the palette I’m currently using: acidic green, mauve, orange and charcoal blue.

Laetitia Chauvin: Do you do preparatory sketches for your sculptures? As you sculpt, are you guided by your own inspiration or by the way the wood is formed and its different aspects?

Laurent Le Deunff: Recently, I’ve been doing more and more sketches for my sculptures and installations, but this act has more to do with the simple pleasure of drawing and the freedom to explore different possibilities than the need to plan out a particular sculpture.
I often compare wood sculpture with pencil drawing: the log is like a blank page, a support that is constrained by its format, but where anything remains possible. A log or a section of tree trunk is not sterile in nature, it has already been part of a living thing, and within, it carries an awareness of life.
During the sculpting process, the grain of the wood, the knots and the beginnings of branches, as well as the size of the block obviously have a bearing on the shape the sculpture will take.

LC: Should we be able to perceive a kind of rebus in these sculptures? Obviously, the viewer is drawn in by a process of montage involving the imagination: are you trying to produce the same kinds of unconscious association sought by the Surrealists with their exquisite corpses?

LLD: I have no intention of telling a specific story with this series of sculptures; I’m just trying to create exquisite corpses with logs and by invoking other works or styles through the use of imagination. I’m inspired by artists who regularly work with wood such as Stephan Balkenhol, Constantin Brancusi, Claudia Comte or Martin Puryear… to name but a few, as well as, and above all, by forms seen on chainsaw sculpture competition websites and various curios and objects from the world of handicraft or the so-called vernacular practices.
In a similar way to the Surrealists with their folded sheets of paper, I use chalk to divide the block of wood into three equal parts. I begin by working on one end, the resulting shape leads to a second and so on until the sculpture is finished. What motivates me with this technique is knowing how it starts, but never how it will end up.

LC: These sculptures obviously bear a certain resemblance to the Native American totem poles of the North-West (Alaska, British Columbia, etc.) and moreover you also spent some time in Vancouver and on Victoria island. Did memories of this period inspire you while sculpting these “totems”?

LLD: Of course, it would be difficult not to think of Native American totem poles when you see my own vertical sculptures, made up of superimposed figures. This however wasn’t done intentionally. And yet, there is perhaps something spiritual in these forms: I never feel alone when I’m working in my studio; it’s as if I were surrounded by ghosts. This series is a means of summoning them and lending them material and visual form.

LC: Production methods and supply chains have always been an important factor in the creation of your sculptures. As far as possible, you favor locally sourced materials, encounters with artisans, YouTube tutorials, studio work and D.I.Y. This translates into research into the simplest, most natural, direct and meaningful of forms. Where did you find the materials used in this series of sculptures?

LLD: One of the things I like most about working with wood is the relative economy of means. It’s important to me to be able to work with short chains of supply, with local tree species that I can find within a limited perimeter. Since my workshop is in the South-West of France and my parents live in the country, it’s fairly easy for me to get hold of various types of wood. For the larger works, I call upon an artist friend, Christophe Doucet, who used to be a forester, and I purchase the rarer wood types from a retired fellow who lives in Brittany and who I met through an online mail order site. The type of wood I use is very important in terms of color, hardness and shape, which vary from one species to another. Moreover, the title of each work is given according to the type of wood used. My eventual aim is to produce a sculpture in each existing type of wood, even if that involves a lot of travelling to find the raw materials.

LC: On the walls of the gallery space, we find large-format drawings of cartoon explosions. What is it about these comic explosions that fascinates you so much? Is it the stylization of catastrophic events a means of distancing oneself, of reducing the disaster to a size the mind finds easier to cope with?

LLD: It’s not really the explosions that fascinate me—in my mind, these drawings are more like clouds—but rather the way they are represented in cartoons. I find them by freeze-framing. I carefully go through a sequence, second by second, until I find the image I’m looking for. The instants I draw are not necessarily visible when watching the sequence normally, as the time they appear on the screen is very, very short. What interests me is literally the smokescreen effect, the way everything is erased, the interlude, the pause and the way it transforms the narrative.

LC: Finally, could you tell us what the title Easter Eggs refers to?

LLD: I chose this title for my installation in the project room because of its analogy with an Easter egg, its position in the gallery and the incongruity of the objects I’ve chosen to present.
I often play video games with my son, in particular Red Dead Redemption 2, a kind of melancholic western that plays on the codes of generic western movies, in an open world, whose every nook and cranny I love exploring. The game involves many “Easter eggs” in the form of secret levels, referenced phrases, concealed objects etc., all hidden away by the game’s authors.

Through his use of the computer keyboard keys that invade his compositions, Moffat Takadiwa accords language a fundamental role in his work. Resonating with constant movement, his oeuvres pit two cultures against one another: one based on an oral tradition, while the other stems from an ultra-digital landscape, perpetually inundated by a never-ending flow of words. Acting as metaphors of digital culture, these dismantled keys embody the new common language of the internet, one that is devoid of any geographical or cultural identity and whose vocabulary is subject to constant evolution and codification. The disassembled QWERTY keyboards form a malleable alphabet that allows the artist to take aim at the English language, a ubiquitous symbol of globalization as well as a remnant of Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Through the repeated re-arrangement of these keys, liberated from their original context, Takadiwa dismantles the language and creates one of his own, free of all political, economic and cultural constraints, in a similar way to those generations born in the post-digital era.

With the same desire to build new narratives, Takadiwa appropriates and subverts objects from the West, in particular from the United States, that have infiltrated local lifestyles. In a similar way to Pop Art, Takadiwa takes mass consumption as a starting point. However, his works are radically different from those of the Pop movement in that they in no way imitate brand aesthetics or the processes involved in industrial production. Instead, the artist integrates these consumer products into tapestries with Zimbabwean motifs, drawing inspiration from traditional African weaving and wickerwork from the Hurungwe region. On close inspection, his works reveal empty Colgate toothpaste tubes, worn-out toothbrush bristles and caps from used Coca-Cola bottles. Viewed from a greater distance, they resemble clusters of precious stones or rich mosaics overflowing with color. Objects of desire are created from used, abandoned and sometimes repulsive items as a mysterious transformation takes place. In a provocative and triumphant act, Moffat Takadiwa seizes upon the consequences of economic and political domination and by anchoring them in a sumptuous, local aesthetic, he succeeds in overturning the prevailing dynamics of power.

In defiance of the Western narrative of art, Takadiwa’s works lay out a new chapter in the story of modern abstraction. His visual vocabulary, characterized by geometric shapes, repeated patterns and structures in series, could easily by part of a minimal art strategy, but one that subverts it. Like Theaster Gates with his Civil Tapestries, Takadiwa charges his materials with meaning, turning the proclaimed neutrality of minimalism on its head by imbuing his works with a political and ecological message.

Like Gates, Takadiwa is an archivist of the contemporary world. This obsession is reflected in his approach to salvaging, the first step in the drawn-out process necessary for the creation of his works. The result of a collective, arduous, almost performative effort, his works are far from a rejection of the physical gesture and spurn the depersonalization inherent to the manufacturing processes characteristic of the minimalist movement or of mass production. On the contrary, Takadiwa accords great importance to craft work, which takes on an almost ritual form. In stark contrast to the automated processes used to create the objects he uses, Takadiwa’s works emphasize the need to embrace a new temporality; one where time slows down.

As a reflection of the Anthropocene age, his post-industrial fabrics evoke urban or rural landscapes, seen from above and revealing mankind’s geological imprint. These damaged landscapes, colonized by objects and transformed into oceans of debris, are strongly reminiscent of the vortex of waste situated in the Pacific, a sixth continent made up entirely of plastic and whose surface area is six times that of France. His works appear to be in a state of overflowing, and thus bear a certain resemblance to the “all-overs” of 1950s abstract impressionism, as well as being intimately linked to the notion of the infinite. Takadiwa’s oeuvre reveals the vast immensity of the devastation produced by man, in which the individual finds her or himself swept away or even drowned. Through this depiction of the decadence of economic growth built on programmed obsolescence, Takadiwa’s practice recalls the fictional archeology of Daniel Arsham, whose sculptures seek to transform contemporary elements into petrified fossils. Unlike Arsham, whose practice is anchored in a post-apocalyptic world, Takadiwa’s works are situated in the reality of today’s landscape. Like an archeologist in a world of waste, he excavates, constantly searching for the buried remains of our society in order to reveal its paradoxes.

Takadiwa roots his recycling practice in African tradition, in reference to the second-hand markets present throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and as a metaphor for the manner in which the economy of Harare works. The artist draws much of his inspiration from Mbare, a suburb of Harare characterized by its sprawling markets and one of the largest centers of clandestine recycling and the parallel economy in Zimbabwe. Although crucial to the protection of the environment and to the everyday life of certain sections of the population, the practice of recycling has been on the wane since the end of the 19th century in most western countries. Takadiwa’s works invite us to reflect on the hypocrisy of certain western societies where marketing strategies use upcycling to justify conduct that is often far from environmentally friendly. By appropriating debris and reusing it, the artist celebrates the African tradition of recycling and sublimates waste materials, transforming them into a new form of wealth to be exploited and valorized.

Takadiwa’s oeuvres constitute a poetic chronicle of contemporary society. At a time when ecology is increasingly under threat and new technologies are transforming the world as we know it, Moffat Takadiwa grasps the situation, embodies it and denounces it, while avoiding any descent into nihilism. Uncompromisingly critical of the world, yet imbued with an almost totemic aura, his works convey a preciosity and presence that demand meditation. By conferring dignity on waste, by intermingling revolt and contemplation, they offer a ray of hope and poetry in the midst of a fragile and threatened society. His works operate as a silent manifesto for a coming revolution.

Jérôme Sans
(Translation Chris Atkinson)

The cult that revolves around William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), his reputation as an author who was both a junkie and genius, his invention of the cut-up technique in Paris at the end of the 1950s, alongside Brion Gysin, his influence that endures through the work of generations of artists, musicians and even film directors such as Gus Van Sant, who invited him to take part in his movie Drugstore Cowboy (1989), all evidently lend each of his artistic works the status of a fetish object. Yet in order to better observe and understand what the author of The Naked Lunch (1959) has left before our eyes, we must go so much further than this state of idolatry.

Both close up and from a distance, the paintings “executed” by the American writer William S. Burroughs in Kansas, during the 1980s and after, seem to me to be the epitome of punk painting. Indeed, a friend of mine recently whispered in my ear that one of these “shotgun paintings” was blasted out by the singer Debby Harry of the group Blondie. There’s something wild about this abstract bad painting, these messy compositions and his somewhat tasteless palette—I can’t help but see and hear traces of Californian punk or the Beastie Boys Sabotage (1993), rather than the New York mythology that habitually clings to Burroughs’ needle-pocked skin. If I had to associate it with the work of another artist, I could see it exhibited alongside the perverse and noisy paintings of the German artist Jutta Koether with her Bruised Grid canvases that emerged from a difficult and introspective period of her life.

However, if we are really looking to establish a dialog between these paintings and the writer’s texts, we should undoubtedly turn towards his essay collection Electronic Revolution (1970). In this concise handbook for media sabotage, the writer evokes a rock festival, where hordes of young people mix together thousands of random recordings: political statements, music and news broadcasts as well as sexual grunts and the farts and belching of politicians, recorded secretly in their toilets. A festival of tape recordings, a sonic magma, a giant celebration of media-jamming, to short-circuit the repetitive and mendacious flow of cultural communication.

The Shotgun Paintings and Burroughs’ other artworks clearly belong to this sabotage operation: he prevents any direct and convenient communication between the paintings and their viewer, refusing any messaging, gluing (sometimes repeatedly) images from magazines to the canvases, saturating the spaces with marks; jamming is obviously the true modus operandi of these paintings. As for the holes made by the gunshots, they are there to interrupt the flow once again, yet at the same time open “doors” to a liberating beyond.

Not entirely by happy coincidence in the times we are experiencing, it was in a recent and masterful essay by the queer philosopher Paul B. Preciado Dysphoria Mundi (2022), that I found some enlightening and extremely contemporary pages concerning the American writer: “For Burroughs, these acts of sabotage had a therapeutic, almost organic purpose. They were intended to heal the social body: mass communication had generated a form of contamination, against which it was only possible to fight by intentionally hijacking the inscription machines. Electronic guerilla warfare was the only thing capable of ‘releasing the virus contained in the word and thus bringing about social chaos’.”1

“Language is a virus”: this declaration, found at the heart of Burroughs’ thought and work, is examined and reused by Preciado in a context of dysphoria, that is to say in reality, one of general disorder exacerbated by the Corona Virus pandemic. In fact, “today, we are probably better able to understand” this strange and viral theory about language that we must also extend to the visual language used in mass media and communication: writing (and by extension language, speech and communication) is always an infection. Yet Burroughs’ proactive proposals to deal with this contamination are even more crucial: “For Burroughs,” Preciado states, “the writer and activist’s task, was to attempt to use language as an inoculation, as a vaccine. Language has infected us and we can only be cured by the intentional hijacking of the semiotic machines that inhabit us,” and that includes turning them against themselves and against the poisonous power they exert on us and within us.

In our hyper-mediatized society, we are all spreaders, that is to say we are infected and trapped in the webs of the social networks, while spreading the media virus ourselves. Swimming against the current as always, Burroughs reminds us of the counter-force embodied by painting and artistic practice, with canvases that he originally made for his own personal mental hygiene, not for the benefit of a spectator, in a mix of quasi-automatic practice, agitated thought, anti-media therapy, acute paranoia and anti-establishment painting.

Jean-Max Colard

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1. Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, p. 72, Grasset, Paris, 2022.

Translation: Chris Atkinson

Among the earliest epitaphs carved into the gravestones in France’s oldest pet cemetery, in Asnières in the Paris suburbs, we can find inscriptions that repeat well-known declarations such as: “The more I learn about people, the more I love my dog,” or “Disappointed by the world, never by my dog.” Darwin believed that the intense love humans feel for their pets was reciprocal, imagining that monkeys smile at us because they are happy; unfortunately, today’s research shows that this superficial smile simply testifies to the individual’s submission to a creature better placed in the pecking order. Although it is currently impossible to scientifically evaluate love and attachment, studies in 2015 measured blood-serum levels of oxytocin, the hormone related to affection and trust secreted by humans and their faithful companions: in a dog cuddled by its human, oxytocin levels can increase by more than 50 %. With cats, this increase is limited to around 12 %.

The bond of love between humans and animals is not built on very solid foundations: according to Professor Jean-Claude Nouët, Honorary President of the French League for Animal Rights, 50 % of rapists committed acts of cruelty against animals in their childhood and 15 % of them also raped animals. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Kant and Schopenhauer, there is a general link between cruelty to animals and violent acts committed against humans; moreover, recent sociological studies indicate that the majority of serial killers as well as simple murderers, “learned their trade” by killing or torturing animals when they were young.

For Sigmund Freud, the motive for this is sexual, so it’s hardly surprising that Steve Gianakos was attracted by the subject. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud postulates that the urge to commit acts of cruelty and the sexual urge are linked in early childhood by anastomosis, an interconnection that is biological. This association of sexuality and cruelty—exercised from an early age and against animals of all shapes and sizes—is quickly curbed and ideally even controlled by the emergence of feelings of pity; the ability to empathize with the pain felt by others, including animals, which inhibits the universal desire to dominate and that appears relatively late in a child’s development.

Artistically, empathy takes on an unconventional form in Gianakos’ work. In a now legendary interview with Susan Morgan in 1979, published in the second issue of the magazine Real Life¹, whose cover featured a drawing from the How to Murder Your Pet series, the artist states: “My work is not nearly as offensive as the people who look at it. Just walking the streets, you see things which are much more disgusting than anything I could ever conceive of doing—people vomiting all over the place. I try to sweeten things up, I don’t try to vulgarize them. I try to take things I know exist and make them prettier, rather than trying to make pretty things more ugly. When you talk about rich ladies fucking their dogs, that’s an example of something it would be impossible to vulgarize because it’s already too vulgar. So, the only way to prettify it is to make a nice picture of a rich lady fucking her dog. At least that would appeal to some people.” In 1945, in Bruno Munari’s book for children Animals For Sale, an animal salesman desperate to find the ideal companion for an invisible child, finally discovers that rather than an armadillo, a pink flamingo or a porcupine, what the child really wants is a roast chicken with fries!

In the above-mentioned interview, Gianakos gives free reign to his caustic and iconoclastic humor when addressing the question of subjects of art. For example, he mockingly asks: “How many artists have already painted flowers and are going to paint flowers for the next hundred years? What’s with them and flowers? Why don’t they paint germs? How many artists have painted paramecium? Only Arp. Didn’t Arp paint paramecium? I think that was very perceptive of him.” Pushing his theory still further, he states: “I’m very fond of snots, but I’ve never sold a snot painting. I don’t think even Picasso could sell a snot picture, I really don’t.”

Produced in 1978, the 24 drawings that make up the series How to Murder Your Pet are perfect examples of Gianakos’ art. Firstly, as we have already seen, the subject matter is deeply linked to the primal emergence of sexuality. Secondly, the serial treatment of the subject is typical of his working practice. As he explains to Susan Morgan: “Obviously the best way to murder something is to tie a rock around its neck and throw it off a bridge, but since I’m so arty and these are all very visual, I make my idea a pretty picture.” In this series, Gianakos does not depict dead domestic animals, but rather ways of killing them, a variety of forms of torture that are all variations on the childish cruelty described by Freud. While some of them have obvious sexual connotations (the goat, stuck in a doorway with a sweeping-brush in its rectum, which at the time outraged a number of commentators), others depict the brutal—and certainly painful—encounter between an orifice and a foreign body: the guide dog with a walking stick protruding from its eye socket, the bowling ball forcing open the hippo’s mouth, the cow sucking on the exhaust pipe of a beetle (the car), the leg of a modernist chair being force-fed to a duck… There’s also symmetry in the corkscrew tail of a pig penetrating an electrical wall socket, leading to its electrocution.