With:
Quentin Euverte (1991), Indrikis Gelzis, Hadrien Gerenton, Matthieu Haberard, Clément Laigle, Christine Liebich, Nathaniel Rackowe (1975), Kevin Rouillard, Benjamin Sabatier, Skki ©
Somewhere in time in a madman's diary. We read the misbehavior of agitated and wild cowboys. On the highway to hell, they drive frantically, death seeming magnetic to them. Their steel wheels cry out their last hopes. Fate's sad wings have been clipped, don't you hear then this murmur, these screeches, this cry for revenge? We, meanwhile, are rusting away in peace, eaten away by our appetite for destruction. Our armor no longer oxidizes and the machines are nothing more than puddles of aluminum. In the south of paradise, poker is a liar: each hand is joker, square of ace of spades. In the city of evil, the coils of the high-voltage transformers still warm the climate, the pyromaniacs practice there what they preach, in the form of a dedication to Satan and a golden parachute.
Generation Mad Max was born under the magma. The alchemists of the poor, these masters of reality only know how to sing metallic sounds. They wrinkle the lightning because their bow is electric, HSS wicks as an arrow. Slave to power and its vulgar display, only the 0666 of the beast still answers the call. Their mouths tanned by the Iron Age, cold from the esophagus, crows as lungs, their croaking resonating to our inner ear. Patience of the scavenger who waits until the cables and catenaries are no longer really necessary. The heavier the metal, the fuller the pockets will be. In the distance often, we hear the drums of their instruments under nervous tension.
If the violet is deep, the spleen is ferrous. Even the toothless have a leaden smile. Welcome to my nightmare, to my paranoia, where I bark at the moon. Perched on the altar of madness, I chat with Doctor “I feel good”. Always so high on the LCD, my soul is possessed because quicksilver is in my blood. Doc reminds me that even peace sells, but who buys it? My mercury rage against machines fades thanks to painkillers. FYI, no replicating robot will neither cut your throat nor steal your job; besides their task is to free you from this steel cage. Our machines are much more perverse because societal, cultural, financial… I dream in silence, or almost, of sabotage under the remains. To cannibalize all those steel zombie towers. Yes, my dreams take the form of crumpled sheets, of hammered organs. Charter for the future, my whole story is in the black box.
And, until the countdown to extinction is the blackout. In this black one sometimes begins to dream, even of metallic tropics. Too middle class fantasies to dream of a world only enchanted by advertising, guilty of still believing in it...Justice for all as a suppository...
Cans as sarcophagi, my chair is electric when I surf the banks of the new Styx. Asphyxia is respiratory, ambulatory assistance. It's Hell on Earth according to Mobb Deep and the Hell's Angels, so they might as well be hilarious. Pounding to concatenation, even the production chain has its weak links. In the best of all possible worlds, the Apocalypse will await the penance of the savage. But we pray alone in our metal mental churches. The virgin there is of iron, the Sabbath is bloody there. The Keeper of the Seven Keys rules over and among the living. The last in line must not break the oath. Pandemonium tune doesn't know hymns? So let's enjoy a few quiet seasons in the abyss. We will cut, drill, grind, weld, desolder.
There is something of Flemish painting in heavy metal album covers. There is something of dark romanticism in their titles. All under infusion of autophagic pop culture and collective paranoia. Garish, undead, anti-establishment imagery. In its joyfully grotesque tribality, don't we feel a last echo of a constantly accused freedom. That of an uncompromising aesthetic, theatrically radical and therefore productively provocative. That of going to the end of a journey clogged with the rugged debris that litters the roads of our mechanized dreams. Heavy Metal has its genres, and subgenres. As here, what unites us is not simply a raw material, we are all genres and subgenres. Because all of them, willy-nilly, are lost children of Progress. Sometimes the riffs sound like machine guns, sometimes the grinder moves like the dancer. In a permanent reworking of our ideas in forged filings, let's take each piece of metal as a simple sample of our post-cynical post-industrial post-society. Project your hallucinations onto the iron curtain. In the basements of the matrix, the pollen is made of rail dust. Meth-heads as punchers, even the weed looks metallic. We see a lot of sheep and so few rams, while too many doors are closed to us. Bushes of barbed wire separate the ignorant and the initiated. Descaling as instantaneous. Neither God nor master, just Moulinex. let's take each piece of metal as a simple sample of our post-cynical, post-industrial, post-society. Project your hallucinations onto the iron curtain. In the basements of the matrix, the pollen is made of rail dust. Meth-heads as punchers, even the weed looks metallic. We see a lot of sheep and so few rams, while too many doors are closed to us. Bushes of barbed wire separate the ignorant and the initiated. Descaling as instantaneous. Neither God nor master, just Moulinex. let's take each piece of metal as a simple sample of our post-cynical, post-industrial, post-society. Project your hallucinations onto the iron curtain. In the basements of the matrix, the pollen is made of rail dust. Meth-heads as punchers, even the weed looks metallic. We see a lot of sheep and so few rams, while too many doors are closed to us. Bushes of barbed wire separate the ignorant and the initiated. Descaling as instantaneous. Neither God nor master, just Moulinex. We see a lot of sheep and so few rams, while too many doors are closed to us. Bushes of barbed wire separate the ignorant and the initiated. Descaling as instantaneous. Neither God nor master, just Moulinex. We see a lot of sheep and so few rams, while too many doors are closed to us. Bushes of barbed wire separate the ignorant and the initiated. Descaling as instantaneous. Neither God nor master, just Moulinex.
Quentin Euverte, Paris, March 2018
Black metal, death metal, doom metal, thrash metal, dark metal, sludge metal, speed metal, power metal, metalcore, gothic metal, alternative metal, rap metal, nu metal, industrial metal, progressivemetal...
This variation on a single theme, referring straightforwardly to a musicality with heavy and thick tones, appropriately introduces the new collective exhibition presented at the Galerie Jérôme Pauchant.
Beyond the nod to rock music, the title of the exhibition literally refers to the work of metal. This material that is twisted, cut, welded, cast, altered, polished... summoning in its wake the muscular work of the coachbuilder, the bronzier, the foundryman and of the worker in "heavy" industry.
But far from respecting craftsmanship and craftsmanship, the works brought together in this exhibition seem much more the result of experimental activities: manipulating matter, mistreating it, oxidizing it, the better to reveal it and bend it to the benefit from the form.
If we can speak of a certain brutality with regard to all the works exhibited, it is because they result from apparent manufacturing processes. The know-how is not the concern here, the claim relates rather to the valorization of the procedures: the metal is bare, the point of welding visible, the work of the hand is revealed.
Thus Henri Focillon finds it admirable to “see standing among us, in the mechanical age, this relentless survivor of the ages of the hand. (...) Centuries have passed over him without altering his profound life, without making him renounce his ancient ways of discovering the world and inventing it. » 1
But these hands "bend, bend, shorten, plane, tear, carve, split, slice..." to use the famous enumeration written by Richard Serra in his Untitled (Verb List), thus describing the different actions on matter . Submissive to the will of the work, attentive in short to the resistance of the metal, as to its potentialities, the artists exhibited at the Jérôme Pauchant gallery are indeed here in struggle and to do this, bring out "heavy artillery", to use one of the translations of the term "Heavy Metal".
Benjamin Sabatier, March 2018
1. Henri Focillon, "Praise of the hand", in Life of Forms (1934), PUF, Paris, 2010
