France

S&P; Stanikas

With their large-format photographs, huge drawings in leaden shades of grey, terracotta sculptures that look like bronze or marble, and video, the Stanikas are quite disconcerting. Unlike other contemporary artists who try their hand at all the media as a matter of course, they use each medium for its own specific qualities.

And the apparent eclecticism of their work, the internal logic of their objects in the different media they take up, results, in an immensely unsettling way, in the expression of a mental universe in which sculpture, drawing and photography all contribute their own particular features to assert a unique vision.

When we place side by side, as we have attempted to do for the presentation at Venice, works that have been produced from diverse materials, they might be seen as a collage or a collection; and, what comes as a surprise, with these objects obeying the aesthetic born out of the very logic of the materials from which they are made, they create an aesthetically diverse world with an intense consistency of vision.

And what is this vision? It is difficult to say, since it has a clear aspiration to the universal, to the human condition, to the tension between appearance and disappearance, between the sublime and the accidental, between beauty, which is constantly being challenged, and decrepitude, be it physical, leading to the decomposition of the body, or rhetorical, in a playful act of smirking and irksome provocation.

Few artists today declare with such force the essentially visual side of their vision. Few succeed in resisting the emptiness of words, and at the end of the day are incapable of stating, describing or explaining a vision which is based on the tension between an unusually pliant fluency and a robust protection of the mystery which infuses them.

If you point out to this charming couple, who so clearly work in unison with each other, that, basically, their work is tinged with violence, they will reply that this is "after all what life is like".

When you ask them about their technical skills, which allow them to draw sexual images that are rooted in treatises on anatomy, in order to present us with huge drawings that evoke Italian high classicism, or which allow them to create sculptures which convey the perfection of casts and patinas from the 19th century, they explain it by their training. Then they smile, absolutely aware of the diversion they are causing, using their work to speak, with a rare precision, about today and the issues in contemporary art. Against cliché, against pornography, against platitudes, against commercialism, they investigate the nature of feeling. They use violence precisely to divert it from its sensational qualities, and to question its very foundations.

There are few works today that promote such a freedom of approach: freedom from fashion, from trendy aesthetics, from consumerism, from the "corrective influence" of demand. There are few works today which do not seem to be nothing more than singularities passing as aberrations.

The main reason why I like this work lies in the fact that it owes nothing to others, it develops out of an internal necessity, it makes no concessions, and it has the basic aim of inquiring into, often rather sadly, the human condition. Also because it rejects superficiality in order to show itself for what it is: a radical questioning of human nature today, expressed with an incredibly strong sense of proportion, scale, enigma and mystery.

Christian Caujolle

Represented artists

Guest artists