Claude Closky

Town and Country
06.06.09 - 25.07.09
opening : 07.06.09 / 5-8 pm

ZOMBIES

Town and Country is a collage series. Each of the photographs that have been cut out of magazines comprise at least one human figure and are accompanied by the artist’s hand-written commentary in the style of a title. This added commentary halts our gaze on those glossy images that we have become so used to seeing pass before our eyes at such speed. He makes them talk outside their commercial and reassuring discourse. The written text brilliantly ignores the “message” instilled in the easily decodable “visuals” and introduces an element of uncertainty into their reading.

All the texts in Town and Country speak about death as if it were the subject of the series. However, the work is more complex. Claude Closky never presents his audience with a “picture” of reality; instead he is more interested in what his cultural background and his imagination urge him to impose on this reality. In other words: Closky focuses his work on those modalities of representation, which give reality its form. The verb “to die” introduces a framework for each collage in the Town and Country series: to die in the street, on the beach, at a masked ball... Closky writes “To die barefoot”, or “To die in the kitchen” as if wearing shoes or cooking could kill. Nothing can prevent us from losing our lives on the road, or lying on the grass, or barefoot, or on horseback. But these circumstances are not enough to die from. They are indifferent to the event, unique and unrepresentable, of dying

.The characters in the photos promote the image of eternal youth, a form of immortality. Closky does not denounce the repressed in fashion and advertising. This is an old story that would put him on the side of the message. It’s not the position he stands for in his work. If we look back to the subject of the series, we need to focus on the deficiencies and incongruities they produce.

Each element of Town and Country rests on the superposition of the frozen replica of the living -- the magazine photo – and the seemingly improvised hand-written annotation; the authority of printed matter and the fragility of the hand movement. This gap between the industrial reproduction and the marked sentence, between different media, different gestures, different messages, brings us back to the idea of death in the most unkindly way. Besides, as it isn’t explained, the passing away in different situations and contexts of the characters is simultaneously removed. To die in the bath, at the gym, whichever way. But to die of what? The connection is missing, the image of death is broken up into pieces. The most striking distortion comes from the fact that these figures, which are supposed to embody eternity and a better future, have suddenly come to embody final disappearance, an experience that is radically anti-commercial and can not “be lived”. The deficiencies and incongruities that manifest themselves in Town and Counry create an allegory of death. Claude Closky sheds light on the impossibility to describe death and nothing else.

Closky’s work is about representation, it isn’t about making figurative images. In this work, using completely banal contemporary images, and by relating these to the unrepresentable subject of death, he dismembers the operation of giving appearance to things and the fabrication of resemblance. The meaning of the collages drifts away. Their absurdity stems not from the vanity of images and words, but from the imminent unease of representing the subject of death with these texts and images. The indecent regurgitation of this anti-documentary formula paints a grim picture of a future without precedent and without horizon: a world of the living-dead.

Here the only repetition is death; an experience that cannot be reproduced.

Marie Muracciole