Chloé Delarue at La Salle de bains

Artist: Chloé Delarue

Exhibition title: TAFAA#30

Venue: La Salle de bains, Lyon, France

Date: September 14 – December 21, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and La Salle de bains, Lyon

TAFAA is an acronym for Toward A Fully Automated Appearance. Each piece of work by the artist Chloé Delarue that has been presented to the public since 2015 bears this acronym-title, which is specified with a particular index number or sports a subtitle. And each of her sculptures or shows – which are always designed as a whole – is a portal on yet another sequence of one and the same narrative, one that is intermittent but also infinite, and whose framework is constantly dissolving. Those who have encountered TAFAA situate this narrative in a future that seems to be in stasis, waiting for our present; a future that has apparently developed a paranoia with respect to absorbing all the utopias whose pitfalls are already known to it in advance, but a future that has also bypassed the fallen dystopias that a myriad of sci-fi stories have promised us, due to the constant updates under the pressure exerted by real time.

For TAFAA is an esthetic program and its elaboration reckons with the terrifying and objective realizations of science fiction. It is, for example, the development of (apparently) artificial externalizations and their gradual autonomization, the exhaustiveness of dematerialization to the advantage of the total exercising of the commercial and biological powers of subordination, which works through the invisible force of control and influence; or the creation of landscapes of toxic waste pouring from behind simulacra generated by simulations. But what TAFAA anticipates is the esthetic inconsistencies of this context – which philosophy calls posthistorical or posthuman – on our senses. In Chloé Delarue’s words, “From flesh to the mirage, from feeling to its code,” this is TAFAA’s field of speculation of, that is, knowledge of one’s perception of a world that is continually scanned, decoded, and re-encoded.

Each instance of TAFAA also brings to light different sections of one and the same membrana mucosa, which has revealed throughout the exhibitions its colossal dimensions and the extent of its functions. These remain obscure, contained beneath the vague features of an “in-between,” a clandestine state where you will find data stored, treated and produced – according to the autarkic power logic to act having access to infra-technique modalities – in material forms (or rather counter-forms), the molting of latex, of surface residues left by obsolete activities and bodies. This mucosa always appears stationary but also constantly under stress, as if it were merely a matter of producing its own image, exposed – for the run of the exhibition – to effects of entropy, where the neon lights end up burning out and the latex getting baked.

Below at La Salle de Bains, the present is ending, wearing out, becoming dispossessed. A treatment center on hold, where these instances of allegorical molting, as the only symptoms of things and beings that have migrated into their code, reveal what we leave behind through the increasingly deeper appropriation of our beings.

They are drying up, these skins that are emptied of their signifiers, perhaps to replace, on the carcasses left in the wake of the reign of the simulacra, neon signs and LCD screens, like the bones of images, where TAFAA generates an analogical simulation.

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA#30, 2019, latex, neon lights, metal, PVC, LCD panels, variable dimensions