It doesn't take long for a visitor to detect in the assemblage of abstract shapes hanging in the Paris-based Galerie Danysz, a Mickey Mouse head. Yet there is something pretty bizarre about it: the head is square and decorated with minimalist Suprematist configurations that call to mind Kazimir Malevich. Besides, one ear looks like the Pepsi logo, another ear conjures up memories of the target-shaped Lucky Strike logo designed by Raymond Loewy. In a way all the references are correct, you're indeed staring at a work combining Suprematist art with consumerism - "Kasimir X Walt X Raymond" - by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.
This assemblage is one of the many on display (from today through March 17, 2018) at the Paris-based Magda Danysz Gallery (78 rue Amelot) as part of the exhibition "I Want! The Empire of Collaborations".
The event concludes the trilogy that started in 2009 in London with "The Triumph of the Signs" in which the designer covered famous canvases with logos of iconic fashion houses (anticipating the 2017 Jeff Koons X Louis Vuitton's collaboration...).
In that case Édouard Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" was covered in Louis Vuitton's monograms; Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "La Grande Odalisque" turned into a Gucci stamped piece, while the most popular paintings of the Renaissance, the portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza were decorated with Dior and YSL logos.
De Castelbajac continued these studies in a new exhibition in 2010 entitled "The Tyranny of Beauty" at the B.A.N.K. in Paris, in which he collaged Botticelli and Walt Disney and Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" with the Nike swoosh.
With "The Empress of Collaborations", de Castelbajac continues his practice of cultural hijacking, prompting visitors to ponder about very common issues in today's design scene – appropriating, recycling and borrowing. Too many designers are indeed engaged in an endless cut-and-paste exercise without producing anything new and without homaging their source.
JCDC has been a bit of master in this exercise: Andy Warhol's face, Keith Haring's drawings and multiple cartoon characters from Walt Disney to Snoopy have populated his work. Yet, as he often explains in interviews, he has also turned around art tropes and ideas, he has twisted them, reinventing and transforming his original inspirations to make them his own and eventually ending up in creating new hybrids.
Another issue JCDC tries to tackle with this new exhibition is the constant and quite often useless cycle of collaborations that happen everyday on the design scene: a current collaborator of brands such as Rossignol and Le Coq Sportif (while in the past he has worked with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Bettina Rheims and Loulou Picasso...), de Castelbajac explores in his new works the collaborative frenzy of our days that in some cases only proves there is a vast sea of emptiness and poverty of ideas out there, while at the same time he encourages a pastiche of artists through his canvases.
He therefore symbolically "collaborates" with various brands such as Goya and Hermès, covering their shopping bags with paintings, creating pieces of contemporary archaeology with a situationist twist about them. In another piece he juxtaposes Sonia Delaunay with Sonia Rykiel, offering us a new hybridic and ideal yet impossible collaboration.
De Castelbajac also spots the contractions of the industry via his trademark irony: in some of his pieces he traces chaotic maps characterised by the logos of some of the trendiest fashion houses, adding the names of the various creative directors that directed those houses and brands.
The funniest thing about these pieces is that they give shape to the intangible musical chair game that many creative directors have been playing in the fashion universe in the last few years, prompting visitors to ponder a bit about the state of the industry and its rhythms.
Some of these works covered in logos and names, arrows and scribbling in de Castelbajac's beloved red, yellow and blue, look like the notes of a crazy mathematician who is trying to find the perfect equation or they resemble underground-like maps, with hundreds of stations and creative destinations that at times do not lead anywhere.
These works are the best representation of the incessant cycle of contemporary collaborations, but they also make you think about JCDC's role.
Maybe he should focus more on art as, in the current fashion industry, there may not be too much space for a designer who has mastered the Pop Art joke, but who is not terribly young and painfully hip as the current ones. Yet there is surely space for a prankster and a fun commentator who may be able to dispel with a smile and some bold colours the false myth of the trending genius or of the celebrity designer.
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