Chloé Delarue at Kunsthaus Langenthal

Artist: Chloé Delarue

Exhibition title: TAFAA – NEW RARE XPENDABLE

Venue: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, Switzerland

Date: February 7 – April 7, 2019

Photography: Martina Flury Witschi / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthaus Langenthal

Kunsthaus Langenthal presents Chloé Delarue (*1986, lives in Geneva) largest solo exhibition to date, which combines recent works with a complete installation covering the entire first floor’s nine rooms.

Delarue’s work first strikes the eye through its sculptural presence and recurring materials such as latex, neon, cables, dissecting devices and other undead elements of the electronic age. The thinking supporting the neo tech industries is used as a means for aesthetic and theoretical perception leading to simulités in becoming, which inspire her sculptures whose ambiguous finitude reveals «a future already aged before we reach it», condensing perspectives corrupted by the permanent updating of our modes of existence.

The title “TAFAA”, which she has been using since 2015, seconded by new subtitles for each iteration of the work, goes in this direction. The abbreviation stands for “Toward A Fully Automated Appearance” and captures the instability of our time.

Unlike the smooth, brilliant, immaculate objects and disembodied software of Silicon Valley, Delarue’s art confronts us with a superficially dirty, iridescent, baroque and organically dubious proliferation.

The rotting plants turn out to be cables of burnt car wrecks, tinned cuttlefish melt into a kind of laboratory table, aloe vera leaves are crushed as in an experiment, light comes from dusty discarded neon tubes. Similar to a nervous system, a coherent cable structure traverses the exhibition.

In all of her works, the artist uses latex to mould objects and surfaces such as pipes, tires, manholes, floor coverings or the vegetal roof foam of an industrial building.

Here, a mutation process seems to have occurred. Empty skins have a life of their own, like doppelgängers. Delarue also mentions her interest in the Capgras Syndrome, a rare mental condition in which people think their loved ones have been replaced by duplicates.

Practically no material is associated with the human skin – even the fetish – like latex, originally a natural material made from Hevea. The skin is also a sensory organ and we perceive the work of Chloé Delarue quite physically: one sees, smells, hears and feels thanks to heated skin of integrated infrared lamps, the only sources of heat that temper the rooms.

It is not surprising that descriptions of Delarue’s works quickly bring science fiction into play, such as Ballard or Cronenberg, with their highly sexually loaded technological accidents. However, the relationship to science fiction here is particularly interesting at the temporal level.

It seems that we are facing a future that has not yet arrived, which is already in a state of disintegration. The «Toward» in the title suggests the desire for an alternative development, which is unstoppable.

The entanglement of different temporalities is found in the exhibition in different ways, for example by way of an installation reminiscing of a calculating machine, a loom or printing machine, in the beautiful old office of the clerk of the city. A strip of latexed newspapers covers a structure highlighted by pale light.

The declining information technology of the Gutenberg era and the city illuminated by neon advertising here become an image of the current and future changes in information technology.

The art historian Adeena Mey rightly calls Delarue’s installations « technological hallucinations ». In the accident, the obsolescent, the error or the bug, a technology becomes visible which otherwise works invisibly and without being questioned in the background.

Delarue shows it in a powerful way in a video where we see her hands interfere with the electronics of a screen in order to manipulate a video. Here, the artist brings to the foreground the unconscious of the machine, which is now part of the circuit itself.

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – NEW RARE XPENDABLE, 2019, exhibition view, Kunsthaus Langenthal