Aline Bouvy / John Gillis:
'Another drenched night at the Pagano Club'

Project space:
David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan
'We are Plastique Fantastique, Staabucks Fukkee is your enemy'


Aliceday are pleased to announce a joint exhibition by two collaborative partnerships, Brussels-based Aline Bouvy / John Gillis, and David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan, a London-based artist and philosopher, respectively.

The work of Bouvy / Gillis features combinatory 2 and 3-dimensional 'collaged' assemblages that form schematic, dis-organised bodily forms. Plundered from a variety of contexts, including the art-historical archive, the haute couture boutique and the sex shop, these materials are de-faced and reconfigured into libidinally-charged, faux-mythological totemic fetishes. They nonetheless resist location in any historical time; they do not directly quote or reference anything. Rather, they are 'pre-posterously' out of time, dis-located between the ideal and real. Like tribal artefacts, these are collective manifestations, but here the tribe, the collective, the Club Pagano, exists virtually as a 'community-to-come' - and maybe in more ways than one. But Bouvy / Gillis, in exceeding the distinction between the real and the illusory, activate the 'power of the false' ­ the 'fact' that the virtual has an actuality and vice-versa, and for one night, maybe longer, the future might be already here.

This is where Bouvy / Gillis' work overlaps with the work of Burrows & O'Sullivan and their Shrines for a people yet to exist. Burrows & O'Sullivan's first Plastique Fantastique collaboration was a text written for a solo exhibition by Burrows. Through writing the text O'Sullivan invented a guerrilla group who he imagined as the authors of the exhibition. A comic book that constituted an image of the collective and narrated their activities followed, and the pair then produced objects and staged performances to actualise and call forth Plastique Fantastique. They produced objects that assumed the form of shrines or devotional objects that drew on the work of Post-Minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Yayoi Kusama but whose use is still to be imagined.

Here they present a series of works that includes a shrine conceived around the Baroque concept of the Borromean knot. This is not metaphorical or representational, but constitutes in itself a simultaneously inside-out, open structure as real process of infinite re-tying. It is concerned with connecting, rather than communicating, extending rather than undoing. Here again they overlap with Bouvy / Gillis in going beyond the anti-aesthetics of montage and its neurotic obsession with fragmentation, negativity, irony and mourning. These are not allegories ­ "there isn't nor has there ever been anything to understand", as Burrows & O'Sullivan assert. Brazenly affirmative, all the works here strive to exceed representation and its critique, to harness the powers of the body to affect and be affected, in order to grasp art's real 'powers of the false' to create new sensible encounters that might summon forth new, radically mutant subjectivities. Club Pagano is now open.