Jesse Darling’s installation of cut flowers trapped inside plexiglass vitrines at Le Petit Palais offers a bounty of visual pleasure spiked with an indictment of its viewer. Aptly titled, VANITAS, this work presents a devastating teleology. Even though the exhibition just opened, the cases are fogged with condensation and hairy blooms of mold already cling to a few stems. The impending decay and rot of these fragile specimens jumps out like a silent scream. The petals press hopelessly against the clear walls of their container, and some of the green stalks have the posture of a writhing body frozen in time. Darling has created a context that escalates the metaphorical depth of an already charged motif.

At the end of this opulent hall sit several altered steel barricades from Darling’s Come on England series. Several of these crowd control devices have added feet and a few are twisted out of shape. These sculptures quickly evoke the state and its mechanisms for managing and repressing dissent. Both bodies of work are ongoing series that have been part of Darling’s repertoire for years. However the intensification of conflicts in the Middle East over the past year add an unavoidable layer of association to these works. I found it impossible not to think of children trapped in Gaza, facing starvation and violent death all around them. The deformed barriers evoke the turbulent energy of protest as well as its apparent futility.

Installation view, Jesse Darling, ‘VANITAS’, Le Petit Palais, Paris, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, and Galerie Sultana. Photography by Gregory Copitet

Installation view, Jesse Darling, ‘VANITAS’, Le Petit Palais, Paris, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, and Galerie Sultana. Photography by Gregory Copitet

The inevitably of death is an ancient theme in art, but the conditions of spectatorship in VANITAS feel connected to the dominant media of our moment. The vitrines have the effect of flattening their contents into a planar image—and quite a seductive one in fact. I reached for my phone instinctively when my eyes registered the collapse of these richly textured bouquets into the glossy surface of the optical plane. The lush colors of their petals become saturated blurs amid a speckled field of droplets. Darling avoids the obvious pitfalls of aestheticizing violence, opting instead to draw out the violence of objectification and the passivity of spectatorship.

The proximity of Darling’s installation to one of the biggest, most expensive art fairs in the world (just across the street) sharpens the sense that cultural institutions have given up on the pretense of addressing injustice and opted for business as usual. As someone who has flown across the Atlantic to participate in these industry-defining sales events—I faced my own complicity in this spectacle of beauty, rot, and decay.

Objects can speak to the senses in ways that avoid the unconscious censorship of our language brains. In this sense, Darling’s work felt like the embodiment of a protest cry. Last week I participated in a protest in downtown London in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Lebanon. One of the slogans being chanted ended in the phrase: “SHUT IT DOWN.”

Installation view, Jesse Darling, ‘VANITAS’, Le Petit Palais, Paris, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, and Galerie Sultana. Photography by Gregory Copitet

Installation view, Jesse Darling, ‘VANITAS’, Le Petit Palais, Paris, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, and Galerie Sultana. Photography by Gregory Copitet

Installation view, Jesse Darling, ‘VANITAS’, Le Petit Palais, Paris, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, Chapter NY, Molitor, and Galerie Sultana. Photography by Gregory Copitet