The creatures of L’or mord l’os (gold bites bone) stand on the border between beautiful and grotesque. Staged at cadet capela in Paris, the duet exhibition spotlights the works of Christian Rex van Minnen and Ken Sortais, bound by their interests in the unsightly. Through their respective practices, the artists reintroduce classical techniques into the arc of contemporary art in a magnetic display of (in)human bodies.
Inspired by techniques of the Dutch Golden Age, van Minnen’s paintings render its characters with “disturbingly plastic precision.” Through glossy sheens and swollen bulbs of flesh, the American artist pushes past boundaries of bodily transformation. The photographic clarity of his work embraces the uncanny, provoking full-body shivers.
Meanwhile, Sortais marries flesh with the mechanical. Through latex sculptures crafted from engine debris, the French sculptor evokes the macabre eroticism of J. G. Ballard’s “Crash”. The machine becomes one with the human body in cyborg statues. Brushed in dusty taupes and grays, each figure summons the archaeology of a future world.
“We mangle our subjects until they sometimes become completely unrecognizable, giving them a new identity,” Sortais says. “The antagonists always clash within the work, and the public is often as attracted as repelled by the forms we use.” At the helms of L’or mord l’os (gold bites bone), a story of metamorphosis begins to unravel—beautiful and monstrous at once.
The exhibition is now on view at cadet capela in Paris through October 5, 2024.
cadet capela
13 rue Béranger,
75003 Paris
