Exo Exo, Paris
Gaspar Willmann
EXO EXO’s gallery stand has been designed by Gaspar Willmann as a model home. The cut-out walls are reminiscent of well-known video games simulating life.
In one of the walls, a window is paradoxically open to the interior. Behind, a white, middle-aged man could be a somewhat voyeuristic and intrusive neighbor attempting to call out to us. The elements that make up the living room belong to the vocabulary of déjà vu: a coffee table, a sofa topped with two or three paintings. The very motifs of the paintings remind us of generic images: a landscape, a sunset, a still life. If it isn’t referring to Art History, it is referring to the collective image-bank of billboards.
Something is wrong, however, behind the smooth, common surface of this presentation. Waste and rubbish are hidden under furniture as if to bury a problem. Despite everything, this garbage is not there by chance. It belongs to the furniture that serves as its hiding place and is carefully chosen by the artist. It mirrors our habits of consumerism with the vanity of the images we produce, the images we choose to live with in our homes. In the end, these are the real windows, fantasies of an exterior or of an elsewhere.
