Chloé Delarue at Windhager von Kaenel

Artist: Chloé Delarue

Exhibition title: TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS

Venue: Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich, Switzerland

Date: Fabruary 10 – April 24, 2021

Photography: © Florimond Dupont / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich

For the past five years, Chloé Delarue has been making sculptures and installations under the title TAFAA – «Toward A Fully Automated Appearance». It is a syncretic system of perception that feeds itself on the prospect of total automation, a technological territory that synthesizes our emotions, everything that is tangible, as well as our behaviors, in which simulations become more and more entangled with reality through their infinite mediation via such technological processes.

Chloé Delarue uses a wide register of materials; cannibalized technical objects, neon lights, tin, glass, metal. Latex appears as a recurrent element which spreads out like a mucosa linking these assemblages teeming with details, bathed in sodium lights or other illumination tinting our eyes.

For Delarue, however, these items do not merely serve as her raw material; they are also significant contemporary witnesses of the technological developments from the invention of cybernetics to the present day. They carry within them this notion of residuality – characteristic of obsoles-cence – objects like so many wrecks of an artificial reef to which our memory clings; «the residues of technical forms brought into relation with the calcified residues of organisms or their images confront our perception to dynamics of exosomatic anthropologization which form our reality. That is, the human merges with her tools and ideas, awakening in her a deaf anxiety from not being one with these extensions, which indeed become more and more parasitic. In this simulation, such graft is difficult as it actually does not take place perfectly, and we observe, here and there, the dissonances resulting from it being rejected here and there», says Chloé Delarue.

Even from today’s perspective, the speed at which our needs are developing is fascinating. They become obsolete a few years, months, days, hours later like so many ever more abundant relics. It is also to this abundance that curator and art critic Adeena Mey refers in relation to Chloé Delarue’s work in the latest issue, n°50, of Afterall Journal: «One of the speculative scenarios conceived by the artist is that of a near future when data centres have ceased to function – a hypothesis bizarrely confirmed in reality by the flooding of bitcoin farms in China, leaving endless lengths of wrecked computer racks. Operating as an archaeology of this horizon made of debris, TAFAA integrates metal frames, carcasses and hardware – the remains of an infrastructure decimated by entropy and the artificialisation of the planet by capital».

TAFAA manifests the feeling of what still seems to pertain to reality, and the border between the latter and a simulation that unfolds constantly. These are questions that are difficult to avoid when viewing Chloé Delarue’s sculptures and installations. Here, they are imperceptible references which populate TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS and which subtly manipulate our perception.

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS, 2021, exhibition view, Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – ONLY RELICS FEEDS THE DESERT (GOODBYE), 2021, 228 x 152 x 48cm, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS, 2021, exhibition view, Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – PIMP MY BREATH AWAY, 2021, 120 x 14 x 24cm, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS, 2021, exhibition view, Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – ONLY RELICS FEEDS THE DESERT (HALO), 2021, 228 x 60 x 40cm, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – ONLY RELICS FEEDS THE DESERT (WANDER), 2021, 120 x 80 x 28cm, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA – BLUE LIGHTS TENDERNESS, 2021, exhibition view, Windhager von Kaenel, Zurich, Photo: © Florimond Dupont, Courtesy: the artist and Windhager von Kaenel