EROTANATOS
JULIEN VOINOT
Curator: Pavlina Krasteva
OPENING: FRIDAY 20 APRIL FROM 18h. TO 21h.
20.04-30.04.2018
Working hours: Monday-Sunday: 16h-19h.
(18+)
The exhibition, dedicated to Julien Voinot, subjects the eternal tension between love and death, these two unmodified components of human civilization. And here, as a mystery of the Sphinx, we are offered a tangled and endless question: why the urge to live? For what purposes? And why all this is happening?
Born in 1975 in France, Julien Voinot has worked for 20 years on a series of collages on A4 paper, typical for the so-called today “post-photography” practice: it is not photographed, but rather there are used found photos, famous or anonymous works of great masters or scenes shot by strangers, or taken from the extensive visual area of the photo reportage and the illustrated magazines.
Julien Voinot’s world, this is “erotanatos”: images of desirable female bodies, moments of seduction, but also images of the pure violence human beings are capable of, from the torture to the atomic bomb. “Erotonatos” – – this neologism does not contrast love and death, but on the contrary, an obsessive and repetitive storyline of the artist’s photomontages, he expresses the fusion, complementarity and perhaps solidarity between them. We love because the ghost of death intensifies the desire and unfolds a love obsessed with the end. We love not to die and because we die in some way.
Still, with Julien Voinot, love remains ambiguous, she shares the power and desire marked by the artist through the obsessive return to naked female bodies, offered to the lust of sight as an exquisite but obscene prey. To love is one thing, but to win the love is another thing, especially in a world where stress, violence and rivalry are everywhere – at least that is what the artist’s collages testify.
The choice of photomontages to be exhibit on the wall without any space between them is dictated by a semantic logic: this world and all that he tells us does not suffer an interruption. Love in death and death in love, this is constant and unconditional.
This exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Paul Arden, a French writer and art historian.
** The event is not suitable for people under 18 years of age
Free entry
Location
The fridge