GALERIE G.-P. & N. VALLOIS

"Inanimate objects, have you a soul that can unite with our soul, and the power to love?"
Alphonse de Lamartine


So where has he got to, Joachim Mogarra, that unpredictable artist, poet of everyday objects, historian who mocks the great classical texts? That sporadic demiurge, child lost in the world of grownups, master magician and gatherer of outlandish images? I left him hanging out with Dante and now, not having been able to talk to him for a few days, I fear he's off down memory lane with Lamartine; the lane not of landscapes held dear, but of wordplay and, dare I say it, roleplay.  
    Never believe him when he suggests you should meet his pack of dogs, because it's certainly no pack and they're not even dogs: just sober china figurines that probably don't even belong to him. On the other hand, stop and think when, after the documentary photographer pose – a latter-day Atget bent on recording the least doorknocker, the most commonplace shop sign, the most elaborate staircase shape – he slips into the garb of the contemporary artist who, in the Becher vein, is out to pin down the nomenklatura of the world's top dogs. Here's someone with an unerring grasp of the rules of the game – or, more exactly, of the chapters in the art history books, especially the one on the New Objectivity in 1930s Germany: that exaltation of the real, the quotidian, in all its ordinariness and verity, which the Bechers would later conceptualise in a wedding of strict photographic protocol and seriality.
    In the course of a brief emulation of a casting director from one of the classy fashion mags, he got his subjects together one by one, checking out the calibre of their coats and making sure their size was right. He taught them to pose nobly, but with heads cocked endearingly to one side; he scrupulously adjusted the angle of the medals hung around their necks or the shape of the bow on their heads; and then he photographed all these remarkable animals frontally and on the same scale. Next, to boost their proud demeanour and set them apart from mere everyday dogginess, he arrayed them against a neutral backdrop that highlighted their purity and naivety at the same time as it made the whole thing ridiculous. For Mogarra never tells us the truth and only rarely takes a stance, leaving us to our free will and our doubts.

Setting his canine friends to one side for a while, our artist transported his little theatre of the absurd into the pseudo-industrial world of the camera, feigning a patient, step-by-step historical description in a fake advertising catalogue he then gleefully put through the mill via an astute analysis of the evolution of consumer uses and styles in the field. Taking as usual something that really exists – in this case the camera – as his initial postulate, he turns it into a meta-image: as a photography tool invading the entire visual field, the camera is confronted with itself. And like an advertising whiz-kid Mogarra uses paint to retouch the rough of what is doubtless destined to become a highly personal industrial idea.  

    Here we are back with the Mogarra who plays on the double meanings of words: a shutter curtain as flowery and as meticulously looked after as the curtain in somebody's spotless kitchen; a Foca Sport model sunk just below water level and renamed Redoutable after the famous French submarine; or weird situations in which he can transform a polaroid camera into a mortadella slicer or, sticking perfectly to scale, a ski-jump for pubic lice. Then he casually throws in observations that are more profound than they at first seem: on economics, with an African camera made, like so many other everyday objects, out of tin cans; on geopolitics, when he sets about photographing the Lubitel, the famous Soviet camera stamped with a red star or a Swiss Army knife, according to its owner's nationality; and on sociology, with his description of the camera used by people taking the paid holidays that came to France in 1936. While he makes references to History with a capital H, as captured by photojournalists amidst the barbed wire of endless wars, he nonetheless remains aware of the history of the art of photography, explaining it with a contemporary version of the camera obscura – or maybe of the myth of Plato's cave; and I can't help seeing La Chambre (The View Camera) as similar to Brassaï's experiments with night photography using car headlights and his Rolleiflex.
    Depicted here, stroke by stroke and just as casually, as if in a series of small still lifes of the cabinet of curiosities kind, is the history of an art that has revolutionised our way of seeing.  

    Then suddenly the historian is transformed into a skilled practitioner, offering a large-scale display of all the products our gluttony and bad eating habits drive us to consume to excess. But here our artist-practitioner wants to open our eyes to these killer calories: blown up against a neutral ground the better to focus on its perniciousness, each item is off-handedly presented as an antidote to our unconsidered appetites. The sophistication of the images is in total contrast with the dark humour of the content. But maybe Joachim's already off somewhere else, performing other magic tricks.

Agnès de Gouvion Saint Cyr

You might say there are two kinds of artists. The ones who spend their whole lives working on a specific question or a style, and those who blow apart all too soon, in mid-flight – in which case, picking up the pieces calls for an atlas and a good GPS. The map shows the great Winshluss deflagration saturating a territory extending from sculpture to drawing, from comics to the movies, from art-ifacts to joint creation of a supermarket. The fragmentation’s there in his drawing, too: a mishmash of styles, colour work and references adding up to a brilliant global demolition job. You’re tempted to acclaim him as the prince of pastiche – a sampling whiz – and leave it at that. But there’s still a lurking, sardonic something… While his scathing line foregrounds black humour, irony and withering cynicism, there’s also a background buzz that can’t be ignored. Winshluss Art is a gallery of rejects, defectives, reprobates, parasites, radiation victims, has-beens, halfwits and losers. They’re violent, relentlessly bent on staying alive and invariably naive, even when utterly perverse. But there’s one realm where their marginal humanity rules supreme: junk. The junk dealer, the black economy, scrap, trafficking, stolen goods, shady deals, car cemeteries, old iron. Winshluss is to finance what antifreeze is to cooking oil, but his junk culture keeps the wheels turning for his outsiders. And he’s got class: that culture is implicit in his line, genres and references, and in styles whose interlocking dispenses with speech bubbles. Obviously there was a place for Pinocchio on this netherworld Olympus from the very start. Out of respect for the purest junk tradition, of course, he’s not made of wood: the bodywork is Z-series robot, all tin and rivets that gleam better in the light of Hades. Collodi’s puppet has morphed into a misfit, a stateless discard, a member of that 19th-century community birthed in the ditches of nation-building, industrialisation and capitalism; the embodiment of people written off in their time as the underclass and destined for the apocalyptic end we all know about. It was by a curious quirk of history that between 1939-44 Benito Jacovitti turned out the first comic-book version of the
story – with no bubbles, since the censor didn’t allow them. Winshluss’s Pinocchio is speechless too, in this graphic novel with no bubbles, or almost: the coveted chatterbox role falls to Jiminy, his conscience, back from Disneyland dressed as a cockroach and living as a parasite on Pinocchio’s mechanical brain. Pinocchio’s silence versus the chatterings of conscience: a face-off that typifies the Winshluss spirit. If ever our artist decided to do Melville’s Moby Dick, you can bet Ishmael would come out Shitmail.
Gilles Barbier

The characters in Adam Janes’ drawings have the faces and self-assurance of comic strip heroes – except that they’re rarely finished, being caught in a escalating swirl of fragments and colours; in an intense magnetic whirlwind that scoops up everything in its path and gives the result an oblique, non-narrative coherency; in interacting accumulations that don’t exclude separate harmonies defined by the edges of the paper. Janes is a sculptor too, his work driven by the need for an occasional break from drawing. As if the latter – too intense, too immediate a medium – demands pauses for building things manually, for working like a craftsman and leaving ideas the time they need to take shape. The consequences include machines for cutting off hands (The Unbeatable Handy Poor Los Manos, Galerie Vallois, 2007), making waffles in the shape of Texas (Delicate Balance Country Buffet, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp), and illegally distilling alcohol (De Stijl Life, China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles). Each time his installations offer us not only the outcomes of his experiments, but also the production systems that made them possible. And Janes rarely shows his sculptures alone: as in the drawings, meaning emerges out of the accumulation of bits and pieces. During the three-year lead-up to his exhibition Candle Chantry (psycho killer qu’est-ce que c’est?) here at Vallois in 2010, Janes turned out candles as a mass- production alternative to sculpture. Then the candle workshop his studio had become gradually wound down, ultimately coming to a complete halt. This was when his “black drawings” appeared.
Pure products of outer space, these drawings show the page up for what it is: a black hole, a strange attractor for the imprints and transcriptions of creative streaming, a channel straight to the artist’s brain.

The new cycle initiated by Janes’ Hunter Gatherer exhibition reinforces the links between the drawings and the sculptures. In a deeply cerebral grappling with the unknown, his drawing acquires concrete form in space, like tangible proof of the universe’s existence. The point being a hunt that involves gathering only what you need. As said by the artist: “Everything, for me, starts with a question. Then I create an activity or a situation [...] to think the question through. (I usually do my best thinking while doing something else.) Sometimes I get an answer to the question, sometimes not. More importantly, I usually stumble upon another question—and that’s when I know I’m done with the last one.”*
* Alma Ruiz, « Interview with Adam Janes », in cat. exp. From
and About Places: Art from Los Angeles, The Center of
Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2008, p. 72.