Artist: Real Madrid
Exhibition title: I think I gave you…
Venue: Société des Arts Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
Date: January 18 – February 29, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Société des Arts Genève
Voyez l’Hiver: ce champignon entre les lèvres semble un organe hypertrophié, cancéreux, hideux: je vois le visage d’un homme qui vient de mourir, une poire d’angoisse enfoncée jusqu’à l’asphyxie dans la bouche.*
A fleshy allegory of decay has fallen from mannerism. It has been used so often over the centuries that has lost its plumpness, aged poorly and lays now drained and ailing (sfruttata, neither the fruit nor the parable are left).
You might want to check on this, a pear of anguish, a cherry of anxiety. Some fruit pits are so small they can accidentally be swallowed; the instrument must be proportional to the player.
Look at Summer: Memories of a scene that got stuck on the lenses and crystalized right before the eyeballs. The reddened eyes turn out to be small cherry-peaches in a flyer of Pacha.
*R. Barthes “Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et magician” 1982
Real Madrid is an artist duo founded in Geneva in 2015 as a platform for collaboration, focusing on identities in development, local narratives, and sexualities. The name plays with the concept of competitive spirit and its transformation into merchandise, interrogating authorship and claiming their status as an imitation of an overpriced brand. Their work has been exhibited in private and public institutions like Migros Museum (Zurich), Centre d’Art Contemporaine (Genéve), GAK (Bremen), Auto Italia South East (London). Real Madrid has been awarded with the Swiss Art Award 2018 and is currently one of the fellow resident at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome.
