New Day Rising
24.2 – 25.3.2018
Camille Blatrix
I've always been fascinated by hold-ups, burglaries and the like. This fascination probably comes from the fact that I find them rather romantic, but it might also be connected to the fact that I was born in a southern suburb of Paris where Antonio Ferrera, a local contemporary criminal hero, grew up. What excites me in all this is the allure of desire, the thirst for action, the thrill of escape, and finally, the way the villain thumbs his nose at society. I imagine my old friend Camille shares the same interest in these kinds of robber-hero stories; the theme certainly forms the focus of his exhibition at Taylor Macklin, which presents a situation that might have been contextualised beforehand by poetically taking the exhibition space hostage. If you look around you, everything leads you to that conclusion. First there’s a sculpture whose shape recalls that of a hydraulic jack holding up a metal shop shutter, a soundtrack sounding the alarm, then a half-open trapdoor in the middle of the space, and a number of elements on the walls indicating an emergency exit. And yet it is difficult, in the light of these artworks-cum-clues, to know if something has happened or is about to happen, and this creates a tension that suggests an event yet to come. Of course the exhibition does not answer this question, and the mystery is not elucidated, especially as the works of Camille Blatrix are often characteristically opaque, or even impossible to grasp. Perhaps we have to see these strange manufactured objects as suggestive elements: surfaces on which ideas can be projected, more than truths or solutions. As the title “New Day Rising” suggests, something new is going to happen, which in itself goes some way to providing an answer. The experience is one of waiting, taking our time, and looking, sometimes without even understanding—a situation we have all experienced, and in many cases that of the exhibition visitor. – Édouard Montassut
