Artist: Yves Scherer
Exhibition title: Where is the love
Venue: Exo Exo, Paris, France
Date: September 17 – 24, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy the artist and Exo Exo, Paris
In his practice the Swiss artist Yves Scherer develops a hybrid project between the public and private spheres. At the heart of his work lies the dissolution of the boundaries between the domestic, public and virtual domains, the unknown and the familiar. The artists does this by superimposing reality with its fictional double. WHERE IS THE LOVE breaks down performance spaces and renders them liquid and porous. The works are arranged here as an immersive mise-en-scène, causing ever increasing confusion between reality and its power of projection.
The common theme of this scenario is the artist’s trip to Asia. In the middle of the space, a fake Prada bag the artist bought in Beijing stands on the floor, displayed in it’s original branded packaging. This “consumer good”, exhibited here in a ready-made fashion, symbolizes the birth of desire and its ever exponentially increasing growth. Opened, offered, the imitation symbolizes and reproduce our desire for luxury, products and manufactured goods.
At the same time, the exhibition space is connected to the virtual world, with an amateur video the artist recorded during a holi- day in Thailand with friends – a pure product of the “selfie” culture, self-worship and showing off your own pleasure (sometimes genuine, but often made up or sublimated) to others. This self-promoting video is broadcast on a television set which is installed to the ceiling of the space. It shows a remake of the Justin Timberlake song “Cry me a river”, produced in bandwidth, image and background noise of an advert or a clip that is taken in by the visitor almost subconsciously. This is the embodiment of a powerful presence that feeds and infects our desire through audio-visual fillers. It can be found in transit locations – hotels, restaurants, lifts, shopping centres – relying on a “one-size-fits-all”, passing, insidious desire, a personification of envy.
Against this backdrop of ins and outs, a few sketches, notes and plans are hung on a clothes line, jotted down on the pages of a notepad of the Royal Plaza Hotel in Hong Kong they form a personal archive used to measure the self-validating strategies.
WHERE IS THE LOVE then tells the story of a one-upmanship of desire, pleasure, consumerism, distribution and self-worship, staging a body that is already reduced to a transient image and making it readily available. It symbolises the constant repetition of a desire without an object, itself born from another desire, slowly pushing the boundaries of the areas of investment in love and emotion, of fulfilment and pleasure, just like an exhibition space that dissolves beyond its walls.
– Elisa Rigoulet
Yves Scherer, Where Is The Love, 2015
Yves Scherer, Royal Plaza, 2015
Yves Scherer, Cry Me A River, 2015