Artist: Pepo Salazar
Exhibition title: Bag of Bags
Venue: Passages Centre d’Art Contemporain, Troyes, France
Date: January 27 – March 30, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passages Centre d’Art Contemporain, Troyes
Note: Exhibition booklet is available here
A polystyrene path levitates in the exhibition hall, immersing Paulina in a parallel reality, akin to a supermarket. She continues her journey, composed gestures, moving through the exhibition spaces like on a skateboard in slow motion. The almost blue-white light gives her a sensation of gentle exhilaration, like the warmth of a second glass of wine.
She thinks, “Why do I feel so close to the work?”
Perhaps it’s the humility between form and substance that touches her, the fact that it composes, conducting these accumulations of hydrocarbons transformed to insulate, protect, solidify, eat, sleep, make visible. And probably waste, today, tomorrow, in a few months. “It’s strange to take what everyone throws in the trash and see it glorified on the walls of the art center. It’s like an image-text, a message through sculpture. It’s humble to do that, at the same time quite courageous,” she thinks again.
Why is the exhibition path a bit unsettling? Paulina felt that in the corridor too, facing this large canvas full of deformed sausage patterns, strange, badly photoshopped bugs, preventing her from admiring the art center’s garden, much more majestic. The paradox is glaring. The bloody meat against the bucolic green of the garden, romantic period against capitalist reign. She feels manipulated by space, she lets this emotion slide off her.
If it’s not a question of meaning for this artist, then perhaps it’s about opening enough meaning within the works to suggest that they are political works?
Paulina catches the reflection of her hands on a piece of mirrored plexiglass; recently, she had a manicure that she loves. She thinks of Cardi B and how she can’t take her card out of the ATM with such long nails. But as solutions are never far away from creation, there are now plastic clips that magically remedy this gripping issue. She thinks it must not be easy in art school, with almond-shaped gel nails, square or even pointed, especially in the propaedeutic year, where you have to try a bit of everything. At the same time, it’s also a feminist gesture and posture. Cardi B doesn’t get her hands dirty; she takes power.
Anyway, it’s a bit like trying to withdraw your credit card from the ATM with very long nails, Pepo Salazar Lacruz’s work.
“It requires effort, but it’s not elitist,” she thinks. What’s elitist is the rich who continue to get richer, maintaining disdain for the working classes, while half the population keeps 50 IKEA Allen keys in their drawers without knowing exactly how next month’s rent will be paid.
There is effort to be made, finally, between the image and the implicit text. What are the reasons that led the artist to create these works? Is that what we’re talking about here? Politics?
There are pieces that she finds funny too, despite the acidity of their appearance. Smiling feels good, especially when the world is collapsing on all sides. Already, the title of the exhibition, between alliteration and onomatopoeia, could be a parodic rap album name. Bag of bags, in French”sac à sacs,” sounds strange when said quickly. Does it speak of obsessive collection when he accumulates yogurt lids or corners of plastic bags? Is it related to modernism?
-Maëla Bescond, 2024
