Toxic Tricks - Artifices Toxiques
Imagine a staircase covered with hundreds of bars of soap, an entirely white painting made with cream cleaner, an undulating frieze made up of ‘Ushuaïa’ brand deodorants, and glass sculptures filled with shampoo and shower gel. Imagine the odours. Let your nostrils fill with these synthetic perfumes. You breathe deeply; the colours are vivid and artificial. Everything seems familiar, the objects so well known, echoing marketing campaigns from the past. Little by little, the odours become even more vivid, the colours harsher, and the overwhelming quantity of the products used engulf us with a sense of nausea.
This is a claustrophobic world of convenience products, a kind of organized chaos turned on its head by the artist, Boris Raux. He exaggerates, subverts and reconstructs, looking beyond the supposed end usage of these products that overwhelm supermarket aisles. Through the analysis of social phenomenon, he delves into the unconscious messages of these products. Dangers invisible to the naked eye are placed right under our noses. Beneath their veneer of modern comfort, there is another world that opens up – one of ecological catastrophe right on our own doorstep.
What is hinted at by the wording and phrases used to label these products is even worse. It is an artificial society that no longer knows where to find the natural, which can only fantasize about nature - wrapped up in its own pretty marketing.
But the work of Boris Raux is not all about disaster. There is nothing eye-catching or harsh, yet his work plays with the double irony of the products common and bland aesthetics. There are attractive shapes, an obsession with clean lines, perfect curves and “pure” colours. In fact, his work adds nothing to the product they are made up of: it’s the products themselves that speak; their chronic lack of imperfection, their inability to stand out and the way in which they are always hopelessly true to form.
Take for example the Le Sprint project. Tens of Adidas deodorants placed upside-down form a long carpet on which the visitor has to walk in order to get to the rest of the exhibition. With every weighted step, the deodorants sprays are activated. The odour is rapidly overpowering. The visitor picks up pace, he starts to run as if on hot coals, to try and escape the toxic cloud that fills the space and which he himself just makes even bigger. The exhibition space becomes impenetrable, a danger zone. This space created specifically with the purpose of showing art and making the work accessible, becomes, because of the work itself, an inaccessible, dangerous space - a place no one wants to visit.
There is a lingering paradox, like the reflection of a consumer society deathly bored; a society obsessed with cleanliness, scrubbing, removing all trace of itself, even those of its own death throes. The Self-Cleaning project illustrates this. In a completely self contained system, window cleaning product is pumped round continuously never tiring of cleaning up the traces of its own passage.
What else is there left to show? Perhaps the Surface Drawings. Hundreds of polyacrylamide copolymer beads cover the floor. These are tiny capsules which contain a product made for floor cleaning. The composition is entirely random, made by throwing the beads on the ground, creating a psychedelic landscape. As the days go by, the indulgently large quantity of beads start to dry out, and the product they enclose begins to leach out in excessive quantity. The work is intended for the time period between exhibitions, the time to clear up between showing the work of two artists, when there is no visitor access to the temple of exhibition, when we can no longer pass through. A time when the visitor is left outside, on the other side of the window, quite simply confused.
Luckily, Boris Raux knows his visitors, his contemporaries. He has even created portraits of some of them. These are portraits without people. Each person is represented by the range of beauty products and perfumes that he, or she, uses. Dutifully lined up, each tube, each bottle, says something about us.
These products tell us something that we ignore. A certain way of being, of feeling, of washing ourselves, a return to cleanliness. That is, before the big spring clean…
Jean-Baptiste de Beauvais
Philosopher