Adult World at Clearview

Artists: Mathis Collins, Andrew Mania, François Maurin, Elsa Philippe

Exhibition title: Adult World

Curated by: Exo Exo

Venue: Clearview, London, UK

Date: April 15 – 30, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Clearview

Adult World could be the story of a just-out-of-college teenage girl who dreams of writing books, but ends up waitressing to pay her rent. Adult World could mean the rupture, the slap of harsh and incompressible reality. Instead here it takes the direction of transitory space, change and transformation, in short, a space of progress.

Adult World is a complex torn ecosystem. Tension which is at the core of François Maurin’s minimalistic forms. Like encrypted codes, his paintings bring together resin, wood and straps in a DIY fashion combining the fantasy of sculpture with the failure of the third dimension. The multiplication of signs is also brought to the surface through Mathis Collins’ work which uses art, ecology, economy, politics, handicraft, business, like tags. Shared venture is at play here, like at the terrace of a Parisian café, a direct reference from the artist to end-of- 19th-century cabarets.

Adult World is ultimately a capsule for the preservation of a socialising space, as well as recreation and relaxation such as around a campfire and a creepy-pasta story as told under a Quechua tent in ‘My Goo’ by Elsa Philippe : “Oh no stop the experiment, let her out !” Is she in pain? Maybe. Silence to the warmth of the fire. Black night.

Adult World is a porous territory where fiction and reality converse and exchange. This friction is at the heart of Andrew Mania’s practice. His family portraits connect reality with obsession around two major events, both constitutive myths of the artist; during World War II his mother flees from Russia and meets the Yeti while his dad, a german parachutist, helps Mussolini to escape form his prison in the Alps.

Despite its inspirations Adult World is not an irreverence to reality, but to the danger of status quo to which it reveals its mutant face.

– Elisa Rigoulet