Nothing Recedes Like Failure
Mortadelle, Arles
July 9, 2016 – September 2016
Opening July 8th, 6 – 9 pm 

Co-curated with Marion Vasseur Raluy

With: Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Gabriel Méo, Bryan Morello, Natalia Rolon, Clara Stengel, Naoki Sutter-Shudo 

“…sometimes we view success as finished perfection – and sometimes as the perfectibility of growth.” Joel Fisher

Nothing recedes like failure or everything resists it. The artist in his room, rejected by the world, tirelessly painting the same painting. Always failing at doing the left eye. Too big, shiny. Not the right color. This brown’s too dark and this red too brown for the whole to come together. He leaves an emptiness to replace the mistake. And it’s the mistake that makes the painting.

Today nothing is finished, everything indulged. No room for errors, no room for the sacred. The possibility of failure is a weakness and a tight interstice where fraud is possible, where error is a decision. Failure is there. On the face of a young man who no longer is. On the painting that overflows its edges. On a too brilliant varnish. On a too taut frame. 

Impossible to distinguish the finished from the unfinished, the successful from the not. The critic quiets down. The artist closes his mouth. They applaud feebly or yell too loudly in order to be believed. Suspend the judgement of the other, make them mute in this desert of the in-between. It’s not to be done or re-done. Thundering silence, the artworks are silent as a grave.

And if that shuts you up, maybe we’ll have gotten somewhere.