NEW YORKValentin Carron303 Gallery // November 6–December 20“Music is a S-S-Serious Thing” combines industrially-produced objects with a nuanced sensuality in an effort to draw fruitful connections among capitalism, the body, and multimedia approaches to painting. On the walls are paintings made with vinyl ink on PVC tarpaulin framed only with steel tubing, while the gallery floor is populated with belts cast in glass and carefully arranged on kitschy furniture. This odd collection brims with melancholic life. From the immobilized belts that serve as humorously fragile symbols of masculinity, to the tarpaulin that paradoxically ripples and flexes like skin, Carron’s work examines longstanding discourses of the body within painting and sculpture.In Belt on Rattan Basket (all works 2014), a belt slithers out of a basket like a snake, at once brushstroke and sculpture. The crosshatched texture of the basket stands in contrast with the smooth, painted belt. This produces a sensory disconnect reminiscent of Eva Hesse’s 1968 Accession, a steel cube interwoven with rubber tubes, or Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), a teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in fur. Like Oppenheim and Hesse, Carron thrives on incongruous pairings; the rough interwoven material against the smooth skin of the belt engenders a tactile dissonance in the same vein as drinking from a hairy cup. Moreover, the belt is erotically charged, drenched in the possibility of loss and death. Where are the bodies to which these objects were meant to be affixed? One is reminded of Joseph Beuys’s frequent use of fat, a gruesome metonym of once-vibrant lives that have been reduced to a solidified, anonymous mass. A similar operation can be found in Carron’s paintings on tarpaulin, which, because of the viscous, fast-drying nature of the toxic vinyl ink, retain the artist’s mark like a tattoo. Largely comprised of repurposed illustrations from books of the post-war years, these paintings marry the modern, industrial materials of steel-tube frames and tarpaulin with images that are self-consciously dated. Carron situates these historical conversations not on canvas, but rather on metallic contraptions that, as a result of their tube frames, insist on their separation from the gallery wall, begetting a feeling that these objects are in a state of becoming. They are neither transparent windows onto the world nor wholly abstract distillations of the world, two camps between which painting oscillates as a discipline. Carron condenses these themes into Cold Figure, in which patches of pigment in simple geometric shapes tentatively compose a silhouetted form. The work creates an entity that is in the process of decomposing and simultaneously reconstituting itself, echoing Carron’s investment in materials that suggest impermanence even as they fearlessly expose their fragility.A version of this article appears in the February 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
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