Ernst Museum Opens Delvoye Exhibition

It is not that easy to be scandalous in contemporary art anymore. There are few things that cross the boundary of acceptability in galleries today, even if they are looked at with unease in other areas of life. Delvoye has excellent results in this area; mainly because of the absurd perfectionism he applies to every detail of his works. He follows weird associations and mixes them with sarcastic humour, a rare phenomenon among his contemporaries. But beyond disgust and humour, he knows that existing traditions are the best starting point to set out and discover new areas. He follows this principle when interpreting, referencing or questioning a whole range of Belgian conventions in painting from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

 

He delicately turns on its head the unique and morbid imagery that the Belgian Art Nouveau movement - especially Fernand Khnopff - represented, and he objectifies the frightening and mystical rebellion against mass existence that breaks out from James Ensor's paintings. In particular, he carries forward Magritte's philosophical surrealism by separating objects and motives from their original meaning and placing them in a context where connotations turn to their opposite and progress to new dimensions of interpretation. At the same time, he is a follower of Viennese actionists who touted freedom of expression and described man and society with the help of performances seen as perverted and disgusting by the petit bourgeois.

 

Delvoye developed a bad-boy reputation from the start of his career. At the end of the 90s, he painted a series of gas cylinders in the style of Delft porcelain and he had Indonesian craftspeople prepare gold-painted Baroque foliage to decorate teak-wood concrete mixers. These were followed by excavators in the style of Gothic cathedrals that were placed in the streets of American cities. Then came the 24 pigs that became living proof, at a farm near Beijing, that real art permeates everyday life. He presented two dozen pigs tattooed with Walt Disney and Harley Davidson motifs, stating that the pigs received individuality in exchange for the pain they suffered. The message is not too difficult to decode: a denial of animals as a source of food and a presentation of them as a live extension of fashion trends. The skin of the tattooed pigs has fared well at auction houses around the world, with some collectors offering as much as GPB 35,000 for them.   

 

Since 2000, Delvoye has prepared and exhibited eight versions of his installation entitled Cloaca, using a complex machine to model the stages of digestion. The machine eats, digests and excretes; it has a stomach, bowels and enzymes. This work, lifting excrement to the sphere of art and characterising society as a giant meat grinder, is expected to appeal to Hungarian visitors, as well. The exhibition will certainly bring fresh blood to the current understanding of art in Hungary. It was a daring decision by Műcsarnok to present Luc Tuymans in Hungary at the end of last year, but that exhibition has paved the way for Delvoye, the scandal-monger.

 

The show will run until March 23.

 

Author: Eszter Götz