Antoine Donzeaud, Garçon triste prolifique

Garçon triste prolifique, 2019
Les Limbes, Saint Etienne

Antoine Donzeaud, Suspended Stories (eyes open & eyes closed), 2019
Wood, tarp, polythene, spray paint, wire
Dimensions variable
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Antoine Donzeaud, Suspended Stories (markel), 2019
Wood, polythene, spray paint, flashe, inkjet print on archival paper
140 x 220 cm
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Garçon triste prolifique, 2019
Les Limbes, Saint Etienne

Antoine Donzeaud, Suspended Stories (fleurs jaunes), 2019
Wood, polythene, inkjet prin on tracing paper, flashe, spray paint, wire
Dimensions variable
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Antoine Donzeaud, I hate it when you’re not around, 2018
HD video, no sound
1'58''
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Garçon triste prolifique, 2019
Les Limbes, Saint Etienne

Antoine Donzeaud, Broken Windows (devon), 2019
Inkjet print on backlit paper, resin, glass, LED lights, spray paint, MDF
92 x 34 cm
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Antoine Donzeaud, Broken Windows (corn rows), 2019
Inkjet print on backlit paper, resin, glass, LED lights, spray paint, MDF
92 x 34 cm
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Antoine Donzeaud, Broken Windows (notre dame), 2019
Inkjet print on backlit paper, resin, glass, LED lights, spray paint, MDF
92 x 34 cm
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Garçon triste prolifique, 2019
Les Limbes, Saint Etienne

Antoine Donzeaud, Vanity, 2019
Vanity case, glass
Dimensions variable
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Garçon triste prolifique brings together recent works by French artist Antoine Donzeaud. The exhibition evokes the fragmentation of digital flux and the contradictions of being caught up in the urban pangs of an ambiguous and vacillating post-modernity. The title/portrait underlines the irony of the artist in the face of the ebb and flow of career variations, of the twinges produced by the complex interrelation of images and beings.

The title of the exhibition is a proposal for a French translation of the stage name of a young American rapper: Sadboyprolific. High school student, he posts his songs on Youtube and Instagram. It addresses the malaise of adolescence, suicidal urges, and the flight into drugs such as marijuana. The exhibition, with its domestic reality, unfolds in spaces comparable to a dwelling. This approach fosters the possibility to create links between the body of work and the anecdotes and aesthetic echoes of the history of Les Limbes.

The work A boy’s vanity is a vanity case with a thin mirror on the back of the lid. The object is filled with broken white glass, evoking the effervescent « primaverisme »¹ (« springism ») of an age struck by mood swings and contradictions, the fragmentation of being, the transparency of mass.

In a horizontal structure hung at ceiling height, Suspended Stories aggregates pictorial gesture and sampled image into an experience of the restitution of an intimate moment. The work evokes by extension a vault under which the interiority of the self extends in the same space-time, constantly traversed by the potential cascade of images and digital reminiscences.

With Monochrome Jaune and Monochrome Bleu, whose colors echo the Suspended Stories, the bed is envisioned as the first and last image of a representation of the intimate: the waking up from it and the returning to sleep in it. The immaculate sheets, wrinkled by the movements of a body, become, by totemic suggestion, the pink monochrome of the generation of millennials.

With Broken Windows, Antoine Donzeaud crosses the wall of inner intimacy, inscribing the continuity of a practice that displaces mediums, within the perspective of an experimental synthesis of sculpture and painting. The glass of each element is tinted with aerosol paint. It evokes both the reference to the monochrome and the vernacular object. Broken with a random, final gesture, the result designates breakage as proof of an action of destruction and by extension of subtraction. The series evokes the metaphorical devastation of an urban environment.

Maelstrom of the room, sinuosity of the sheets, primary colors, infinite scrolls ... Between urban post-romanticism and digital hypersensitivity, Garçon triste prolifique proposes a projection insofar as a hybrid and transitory body that seeks, in a tireless quest, the reflection of its ghosts and the shadow of his desires.

– Theo-Mario Coppola

1. The term « primavérisme » refers Tristan Garcia’s research developed in his book The intense life: a modern obsession