4/4/2012
Didier Faustino
Head, Geneve
Dead Zone. A premonition inspired by Stephen King's novel and David Cronenberg's film of the same name, the exhibition presents recent works by the artist, all of which relate to the habitat and deconstruct the traditional concept of domesticity.
curated by Alexandra Midal with Mathieu Bassée as assistant
Didier Faustino presents Dead Zone in response to the invitation from the Design Project Room. A premonition inspired by Stephen King’s novel and David Cronenberg’s film of the same name, the exhibition presents recent works by the artist, all of which relate to the habitat and deconstruct the traditional concept of domesticity.
The exhibition curated by Alexandra Midal is staged with the students from HEAD – Genève’s Masters in Design, Spaces and Communication program.
It should be possible to interpret Didier Faustino’s work on the basis of his interest in and frequent references to American film in the titles of his works and his exhibitions. For the Design Project Room, he provides Dead Zone, a space that refers to the film of the same name directed by David Cronenberg (1983), which recounts the consequences of the perceptions and other precognitions of a protagonist who wakes up after five years in a coma. Although stories play a prominent role in Faustino’s work, this Dead Zone plays out at the confluence between design, art and architecture via popular culture—and repeatedly relates to the environment and the city. It acts here as a point of departure for an adventure that has a direct impact on the emotional response of the viewers.
Opening the exhibition with a head that has been cut out and assembled from the carpet of the Design Project Room, Faustino invites the viewer to reflect on the ephemeral nature of material existence. The response to this very domestic vanity is embodied in the social and emotional melancholy of contemporary culture, counterbalanced by works that play with a form of coarse eroticization of reality. Hence, we also encounter Scramble Suit, which is based on J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise, and suggests a return to the wildlife habitat. Created using aluminum sheets found on the streets, this low-tech assemblage outlines a cross-genre meeting point. Just for Glory, a hammock made of perforated black rubber, can also be discovered there. It offers itself for a debauchery devoid of frills or seduction, of a kind of sex without a name or face that invites and surrenders itself. The centre of the space is occupied by a white picture placed against the wall, whose epitaph is formed by the collapsing words Fairy Tales Falls. This verdict, which is central to the reading of the exhibition, heralds the triumph of dystopia or negative utopia over fairy tales and other pleasing little stories. This apparent massacre plays with both the vanities and the dimension of the architecture of dilapidation and decrepitude, with the ‘anarchitecture’, in which the final refuge is destroyed from the inside and thus moves towards the aesthetic and moral attitude of the dandy.
The melancholic ambiance associated with the flâneur and the dandy lost in the excesses of the chaotic metropolis is the leitmotif running through Dead Zone. It finds its ultimate resonance in the work Temps sauvage et incertain, a seemingly unstable chair. This is the basis, on which Didier Faustino places the foundations of a territory in crisis which must be reappropriated by pushing the boundaries of the private and the public.
Opening : Thursday 5 April at 6 pm
Geneva University of Art and Design
15 Bd James-Fazy, Geneva
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 2–7 pm