Not more then few weeks after Levis show I get in touch with Diesel that was also launching their new campaign - “Diesel Island” - something like “be stupid” but happening on an island. In order to enter this wonderful world, that suppose to be the less fucked up country on the planet Earth, people were receiving passports. And here I come. I supposed to play one of the officer giving some drawings, paintings, whatever to make this passport SPECIAL.

I thought about few guidelines in order to define my performance. Be stupid was the first - the game shouldn't be over intellectual, that's sure! Be quick – how to provide 100 artworks in 3 hours ? Be personal – if this country is so different the passport should be filled up with who you are inside.

As result my brain vomited a pseudo-psychological game of auto definition. Listen to this. The customers were proposed 23 weird objects labeled with some definition like “ I love fried egg”, “I'm screwed up” etc.

In the second instance they were choosing their favorite color (mostly pink) and then we were putting all this stuff on the passport and I was passing the spray/sprays over leaving a composition of shadows. I even wrote on the board behind my stand “ we live in the world of shadows” to make reference to Platon what was probably useless however it was giving some cultural references to this silly game. Maybe even it was making a deeper sense: our SELF is just a shadow of what it is in reality. However, whatever the last stage was a hairdryer and my stamp “ Approved by XYZ”. Welcome on the Diesel Island !

Last Wednesday in Happy Valley when people was betting and Alive not Dead celebrating the 4th birthday me and the horses we were running, for different purposes but at the same speed. I was painting a big board that initially I thought to cover with a betting slip  blow up. However I changed my mind. A painting of a betting slip looks good in a gallery but nobody at the horse racing would get it - that's a truth about public shows - it's better to avoid being too conceptual. The betting slip had also the disadvantage to be quite unspecific - it refers to thousands of different games and I wanted to relate it to horses.

If we think carefully there is two major layers building the event in Happy Valley . The first are horses running around with the faster become the winner. The second layer is the transcription of this event into numbers that takes form of a betting slip. The rest is just a consequence of this tension between races and numbers. Therefore I did a simple overlap of this two layers and that' s what finally I painted last Wednesday in Happy Valley.  

Ladies and gentlemen please watch this video about the REvolution exhibition in Re gallery that I was part of with the "Elephants" painting. 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDtS0I0Gpbs

Last year I did a performance where on a transparent plexiglass I was recording the motion of city - “ Time in stripes”. It was given to me to do it one more time in different context and with slightly different approach. Levis was just about to launch their new collection with the message “GO FORTH” and wanted to make a show for buyers. They brought up  together  dancers, models, models choreographer, lighting guys,musician and me as painter to create “something”.

For my part I thought to explore one more time the idea of RECORDING TIME rather then object; I saw myself as a scanner that follows the event as time goes forth. This evening I was observing and expressing the show by filling up the plexiglass canvas from left to right; every particular moment (dance, cat walk, speech, music band ) receive it's own language of paint, color, drills, writing etc. By the end the work resemble to a diary – an abstract diary of the event.  

After the show with friends we cut the upper part of the plexiwall and transported it back to my studio. It's heavy like hell! There is actually 3 pieces of it what allows to play with configurations : the original one “ GO – FOR – TH” or another one also related to the notion of time and diary “FOR – GO – T” :) Now I'm trying to push some clients to get the whole as a room semi-separation with lighting. This work should be allowed to be viewed from both sides in a way of a sculpture – that's I guess the beauty of plexiglass.  

Fot. Irene Lai

Last week I was exhibiting in RE gallery during  "REvolution" show. It's  was a Maximalist art experience concept created by James Churchill combining art food (by Chef Bonelli and Loic Serot) , sound installation (by Cedric Maridet ) all inside a circus tent with a real hay on the floor and paintings on the wall (7 different artists from around the Globe). You was able to forget that it's Wyndham Street in Hong Kong and concentrate on the Maximal experience of the show. More about the event is coming soon - for now I will share the concept behind my artwork  - a big composition of just 2 elements that has 3 meter hight yet but can be as hight as your budget allow. 

Dancing Elephants perform Twin Towers

Paint on board, each Tower 66 x 297 cm or higher

Circus is a place where the boundary of show is pushed to its extreme in order to bring excitements and memorable experiences. However when every event surpasses the previous one, the audience is proposed a flow of intense emotions that fades away when the new event comes. The spectacles need by then to become bigger and bigger. It’s a sort of Guy Debord’s “society of spectacle” where the spectator is devoted to the consumption of spectacles as ultimate and only way of living.

One of the circus shows is dancing elephants. Attracting the attention because of their huge bodies, they perform perilous and unnatural hand standing on ball or imitate human dancing. Their individualism is taken away - they become similar to industrial products in the way of Andy Warhol’s “Campbell Soups”.

There is finally a third ax for this work - the tower. Making vague reference to Katarzyna Kozyra’s “Animal tower”, Babylon tower and New York Twin Towers, the work is reflecting a play from the old days; back then kids were stacking wooden boxes to make the tallest tower possible. The game ended up with the collapse of the tower the goal and “la raison d’etre” for this construction.

“Dancing Elephants perform Twin Towers” is constructed on this metaphors: global spectacle, degeneration of natural order, instability with a supposed final crush in an auto-referential world of twin towers. Being a composition of 2 elements - “blue ball” and “ dancing elephant”, the painting is leaving the height indefinite with a possibility to extend it in accordance to the growing appetite of the global financial spectacle.