Hasta La Ideas

A twisting chain-link and barbed-wire fence installed by French artist and architect Didier Faustino at an exhibition in Cincinnati determines the path taken by visitors through the gallery space.

Faustino‘s installation is called Point Break and creates a barrier running diagonally across one of the galleries at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center.

Made from a material commonly used to define international borders and property limits within urban environments, the fence is edge with barbed wire to create a feeling of danger that evokes the risks involved in illegal immigration.

“When you cross borders there is always this feeling of guilt, where you feel afraid and in danger, and for me the idea of the piece is to recreate this feeling inside the gallery,” Faustino told Dezeen.

As it bisects the space the fence rotates 180 degrees and rises above the ground to define a passage that visitors follow to cross from the entrance to the exit.

The title of the work refers to the 1991 movie starring Patrick Swayze as an anarchic bank-robbing surfer.

The spiralling form of the fence resembles the tunnel created beneath a breaking wave.

The Point Break installation is an evolution of a previous work that Faustino created for experimental New York exhibition space Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2008.

The original version was called (G)host in the (S)hell and transformed the front of the urban gallery by weaving a fence through openings in the facade.

Point Break is part of a group exhibition called Buildering: Misbehaving the City, which features work by 27 artists who explore the idea of creative misuse of buildings and urban spaces.

In another gallery, Faustino has installed a version of his Home Suit Home artwork comprising a hollow suit made from standard carpet, which was previously exhibited at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris. For the Cincinnati exhibition, Faustino covered the gallery floor in carpet from which the net shape used to create the suit was cut in one piece and folded into shape.

“When carpet – this basic material of architecture – is transformed into the Home Suit Home it becomes a kind of protective element like a real home,” explained Faustino.

Both pieces are part of Fautino’s continuing experiments into the relationship between the body and architecture, which he says are “about experiencing fragility, provoking instability in space and showing how architecture creates a shelter that protects the body at its centre.”

Photography of the Point Break exhibition is by Kelly Barrie.

Here’s some more information from the artist:

Didier Faustino: “Buildering: Misbehaving the City” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

At the heart of the exhibition ‘Buildering: Misbehaving the City’ at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, two of Didier Faustino’s works help to redefine urban and physical borders, to express his transgressive vision of architecture and the misuse of codes regarding housing, thus exploring limits to physical and psychological freedom.

Crossing the space diagonally, the Point Break installation reflects on the materiality of metal fencing and the use of it in towns and American suburbs. It provides a formal criticism, misappropriating this commonplace material to create a passage. The barriers refer to private property, fundamental in the USA, and the passage that they provide here remains extremely dangerous, requiring visitors to take a physical risk connecting them to illegal immigration and to the notion of border. Changing the exhibition space into an ambiguous territory, Point Break expands as if to delineate space, raising social, political as well as psychological questions.

With Home Suit Home, Didier Faustino invites us to enter a disturbing world, strangely resembling ours but haunted by another ‘us’ in customised armour in the most banal domestic material. The artwork draws on signs from our familiar environment but endeavours to turn it inside out, literally, like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable world. It plays with elements representing hindrance, displacement and inversion and takes on bodily characteristics consisting of poor materials from our standardized homes.

Unusually concerned in front of our apartments and offices that have suddenly become unwelcoming, we are drawn to think about the lives that animate our familiar environments and the fictional borders that claim to separate art from our lives, political decisions from our aesthetic models. Reversibility characterises this installation, where the home is in turns designated like a compartment to be occupied and an impossible destination, where the anthropomorphic figure forms an interior as well as an exterior, a container and contents.

Our housing models, our way of organising and accommodating our bodies, our spectacular buildings, the constraints opposing our flesh are in question here. Didier Faustino’s ploy radicalises the architectural intention, to the point of formulating a resolute criticism of future planning for households.

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Faustino at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center appeared first on Dezeen.

Strange hollow figures made from folded pieces of carpet line the walls of this exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris by Portuguese artist Didier Faustino (+ slideshow).

Didier Faustino used low-cost materials including second hand rugs and carpets from trade suppliers to create the empty suits for the exhibition, which is titled We Can’t Go Home Again.

Some of the figures are made with the carpet backing facing outwards and the coloured surface visible through various holes where the face, hands and feet would be, while others feature colourful exteriors.

“The exhibition We Can’t Go Home Again mobilises the signs of our familiar environment but strives to turn it inside out literally like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable universe,” said Galerie Michel Rein.

Most of the figures are held together using cable ties, but coarse string connects the pieces of an oriental rug that form a figure lying in the centre of one of the spaces.

The folded forms resembling soft suits of armour are supported by an internal metal framework.

Also included in the show is a large artwork comprising a wrinkled metallic sheet positioned against a wall with a board featuring the phrase “the show must go home” in cutout letters leaning against it.

The exhibition is on show at Galerie Michel Rein until 11 January 2014.

Photography is by Florian Kleinefenn.

Here’s a press release from Galerie Miche Rein:

Didier Faustino – We Can’t Go Home Again

For his second solo show at Michel Rein (after The Wild Things, 2011), Didier Faustino invites us to step outside of our homes and penetrate an ambiguous world, which strangely resembles our own but is haunted by other versions of us bearing armour built from the materials of our own homes.

The exhibition We Can’t Go Home Again mobilises the signs of our familiar environment but strives to turn it inside out literally like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable universe. Alternately summoning Absalon, in particular his series Cells, and the performances where Joseph Beuys, wrapped up in his felt cover, shuts himself away in a gallery, Didier Faustino’s exhibition plays on the motives of hindrance, movement and inversion.

The semantics of the titles beckon to be heard. The name Home reoccurs like a litany which is apparently gentle and discreetly discordant. In this manner the show must not “go on”, as the saying goes, but rather “go home” (The Show Must Go Home). This home is however declared inaccessible (We Can’t Go Home Again), and its proverbial sweetness has transformed into a suit (Home Suit Home). Whilst circulating between these titles, the meaning shifts, themes of habitat and comfort rub up against those of appearance and the irreversible.

However, the installation is characterised by its reversibility. In the same way that the home finds itself alternately represented as a dwelling to occupy and an impossible destination, the anthropomorphic figures occupying the main space of the gallery constitute both interiors and exteriors, containers and contents. They invoke strange stories: which man is of the type who’s made himself from this soft armour? Against which insidious peril? Against what disaster is he looking to survive? Which sophisticated means enabled him to design the skilful patron?

Protection built from typical flooring of our abodes shows the opposite and seems to both arm against the dangers and point out their nature. Our models of home, our way of organising and housing our bodies, our spectacular edifices and the constraints opposed to our flesh are all effectively concerned here. Didier Faustino’s combinations somewhat toughen the architectural intention, to a point which expresses a categorical criticism of domestic planning.

If we recognise the transgressive relationship of the artist to architecture, we also find the worrying strangeness which characterises his work as a visual artist.

Multiplying effects on meaning, the pieces of the installation lie within a resolutely experimental and multiform work in progress, which maintains a brotherly relationship with the unfinished opus of the film-director Nicholas Ray, to whom the exhibition’s title pays homage.

Strangely worried in front of our flats and our offices, which have suddenly been made inhospitable, we are led to think of the lives which light up our familiar decor and of the fictional borders which supposedly separate art from our lives and political decisions from our esthetical models.

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Faustino exhibited in Paris appeared first on Dezeen.