frieze: Nicolas Ceccaldi at House of Gaga

Nicolas Ceccaldi, 'To be Titled', 2016, Courtesy of House of Gaga

The mass-produced paintings that adorn dentists’ waiting rooms and model show homes are inoffensive but, invariably, depressingly dull. The absence of any specific referents in their anodyne landscapes renders obvious their assembly-line fabrication. They call to mind modernist Hermann Broch’s definition of kitsch as the product of ‘an emergent bourgeoisie caught between contradictory values: an asceticism of work on the one hand and an exaltation of feeling on the other’.

In ‘Les Chemins de la Honte – The Path of Shame’ at House of Gaga, Nicolas Ceccaldi presents just such a series of mass-produced works – purchased from the Pier 1 Imports section of a Sears department store in Mexico City – which he has altered with paint-pen markings, paper collages, animal skulls, butterfly wings, fabric flowers and hair clips. A series of wall-mounted animal skulls has also been similarly decorated. Gone are the artist’s dystopian cyborg sculptures and participatory readymades (Wearables, 2015). Here, Ceccaldi’s gaze has shifted to what the exhibition text refers to drily as ‘flora and fauna: the two essential elements of the natural world’. The artist continues: ‘The call of the wild is depicted in this exhibition as a reactionary tendency against the metropolis, a common reaction exemplified by the development of tourism, the spiritual appeal of rural sites, and the regain of consciousness and empathy for animal life.’ The pieces Ceccaldi presents, however, make little reference to nature. Rather, they appropriate paintings of nature produced on an assembly line – likely the one in Dafen, China, which churns out an estimated 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings for display in middle-class homes and offices. Nature, here, is not a subject of representation but another effect of human consumption.

Continue