For FIAC 2021, Galerie Noah Klink is pleased to present Intrusive Thoughts, a new series of works by Charlotte Dualé.

In her work, Dualé channels the spiritual, ephemeral, and sensual qualities of structures originally set up to perform certain functions. Her mostly wall-based ceramics mimic elementary structures such as language, words, interior objects, or technical tools. Whilst adapting formal aspects and ordering principles of such structures, the objects eventually evade the servility coming with their mundane existence.

Resembling regular wall-based shelves, Dualé’s latest works carry miraculous displacements in the form of deformed surfaces, unserviceable shapes, and cracking forms. Traces of human interactions with the objects, e.g. a handprint engraved in one of the surfaces, further add to the notion of a world in which the fantastic has been introduced to the trivial domestic.

Dualé fuels this vision by letting the objects become subjects themselves, retaliating from being attached to the wall and serving the sole purpose of carrying everyday objects. Thus becoming a surface for projections, the works carry traumas, nightmares, and dreams and form a medium to unload memory.

By arranging the objects in varying proximity to each other across the walls of the fair booth, Dualé evokes social structures, narratives and interactions among the single works and the groups they form, all which echo each other.

Charlotte Dualé (b. 1982 in Paris, France) lives and works in Monoblet and Berlin. She received an MA in Visual Communications from ESAG Penninghen, Paris in 2006 and a MFA from Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin, in 2013. Recent solo and group presentations include Entre aide, Institut Français (Berlin, DE, 2021), TXT, Galerie Noah Klink (Berlin, DE, 2019), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium. Die Ausstellung 2019, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf, DE, 2019), and Die Putze, EIGEN + ART Lab (Berlin, DE, 2017).

Power Play by Mitch Speed

Some questions seem designed to hide cruelty. Like: ‘what is it for?’ This is the mantra, formulated as a question, of a religion of use value.

We made our idea of art — the dream of experience emancipated from function — as a response to this problem, as a way to escape the enclosure of life by the demand for functional returns. But in doing so, we also made new questions, with new double binds.

I see a whole bunch of ceramic objects, curiously shaped and coloured, and all small enough to hold in one or two hands. Often these objects combine a couple of flat planes, which are imperfectly architectonic and glazed in subdued colours — midnight blue, moss green, wet-concrete gray — with forms that recall shed skin, soggy leaves, worms, twigs, and shit. The latter are coloured more brightly, in glazes that are thick and thin, sometimes flat, sometimes bubbling and dripping. Many of the pieces have small holes. Put a nail or screw through them, and you’d be one step away from utility. Object becomes sculpture becomes shelf, becomes a part of the home, which means (especially in the dreamworld invoked by these strange objects…) part of you.

Let’s go out on an old limb, and say that all aesthetic energy is not only retinal and haptic but also social and psychological.

I love looking at Charlotte’s work because I love looking at Charlotte’s work. The pleasure doesn’t need a reason. But part of the pleasure lies in allowing the brain — with its own delight in semiotics, social tensions, and contexts — its place in the encounter. To a certain extent, thinking enriches sensuality. Only paranoid aesthete reactionaries think otherwise. Our job is to tend to that ‘certain extent’ — to counter the hegemony of absolutes, with complexity.

The riddle of what place these objects hold on a spectrum that runs from use, on the one hand, to the pipe dream of unimpeded sensuality, on the other, shapes the work’s vibe.

So if I say: “These objects aren’t supposed to be used! Stop instrumentalizing experience!”, I’ll have a certain righteousness on my side. On the other hand, this righteousness would be compromised, it being the case that this position would itself align with the historical usage of pure aesthetic experience — high abstraction — as a marker of bourgeois superiority. Power lurks everywhere, even in enchantingly quirky artistic experiences. Power is poison. But it also produces form.

Charlotte’s objects hold these aesthetic-social conflicts in tension, so that they can be felt as much as thought. Their playfulness, their brilliant colours, their associations, are participants in this broader effect. When the messier and more organic forms seem to meld with or melt out of their quasi-architectonic supports, they invoke unseen life suddenly appearing in the inanimate architectural surround. That’s the stuff of dreams or nightmares. And also sometimes of the uncanny aspects of waking life. Like rain-mashed leaves spooning with forms in the pavement, or like the uncanniness of symmetry itself, in the form of two objects, interlocking along their mutually jagged edges.