While everybody is looking for the perfect outfit, while children are only thinking about stealing candies from their neighbors, while storekeepers are asking themselves how to decorate their stores this year, don’t forget that humor, dressing-up, jokes and self-derision are also extremely present in contemporary art. How many of us have already faced Duane Hanson’s sculptures and laughed at their mistake? How many of us have been lost in Fabien Verschaere’s fantastical paintings? How many of us have been scared by Cindy Sherman’s clowns? How many of us have desired to play with Maurizio Cattelan’s mobiles? However behind these works that are funny, easily understandable at first, playful, darker preoccupations are often hide.
Duane
Hanson, an American-born Sculptor (1925-1996), created hyper-realistic lifecast
of people made out of resin, polyester, bronze, fiberglass and often textiles,
clothes and everyday life items. Most often sculptures are the exact
representation of ordinary people who don’t stand out of the crowd and are
placed in everyday life situations. Who haven’t spoke to the sculptures at
least once?! Who haven’t ever run into one of them in a museum or during an
exhibition? And one laughed of itself when the mistake is realized. However
Duane’s goal is to put the emphasis on social problems and preoccupations. His
sculptures usually represent a girl next door, a neighbor or a co-worker such
the character of some of his most well known pieces: Bowery Relicts (1969); Supermarket Lady (1969); Florida Shopper (1973); Cleaning Lady (1972). They are touching, fragile and give off
sensibility and feelings. Subjects, who are from the American middle class, are
represented respectfully, simply and realistically. Their hopes, doubts, needs
are discernible as like their resignation.
The
dreamlike, magical and fantastical world of Fabien Verschaere, a French-born
artist (1975), has his mysterious part, his dark side too. One’s getting lost
into the marvelous world of his paintings and through the fairy tales and
symbols that inspire him. His black and white (for the most part) paintings are
filled up with clowns, dwarfs, fairies, devils, ghosts, Chimeras half demoniac
– half fantastical. Associated to playing cards or dices those figures are as
many symbols that mean that life is nothing but gambling, a perpetual fight
between the world of living and the world of dead. His work is sensitive,
intimate and very personal. He brings the viewer into his own world where
fairies, mermaids, devils, clowns, goblins, pixies… live all together, a world
based on its own paradoxes. At first funny and readable, his paintings reveal a
multitude of details and references that do their reading more complex such as:
Video Games (2009), Fake Legend (2009) and Novel of Life (2009).
If
Verschaere’s clowns can be disturbing, Cindy Sherman’s ones are clearly frightening and scary!!
She’s an American-born artist who is known for being the mother of the
post-modern photography. Through her self-portraits, which have to be seen as
conceptual pieces, she questions the role attributed to the women in our
society and criticizes in an acerbic way the middle age housewife of the
sixties and seventies. The Clowns (2003-2004) series can be read as an answer to the attacks of 2001.
Therefore her point would be to keep smiling whatever happens and still
thinking about what can be next. Sherman’s clowns don’t seem to be nice and
joyful. They seem to wear a mask, a mask of a hypocritical and individualistic
society. Viewers don’t know anymore if they should laugh, cry or question
themselves. Should one appreciate her photographs just the way they are or
should one try to read between the lines?
Satire is also very popular among contemporary artists
and Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian-born artist (1960), is well known for his
satirical, caustic and biting sculptures such as The Ninth Hour (1999) which depicting the Pope Jean-Paul II struck
down by a meteorite. His sculptures are shocking, paradoxical, humorous and
ironical and his work is made of performances, provocations and embezzlement. Untitled (2001) simply represents a whole on the ground from
where a little man comes from. One doesn’t pay attention at the first sight
however it questions the viewer who doesn’t know what to make of it. This
sculpture actually represents the artist himself while he’s breaking the museum
as a criminal making an assault on a private and historical institution.
These artists, in their own way, chose to express
their doubts, their questions, their rants… through some funny and humorous
works that are also ironic and caustic in the mean time.
