Jesse Darling has often combined industrial materials such as sheet metal and welded steel with everyday objects to explore ideas of the domestic and the institutional, home and state, stability and instability, function and dysfunction, growth and collapse. Taking cues from Towner’s coastal location, Darling brings together new and recent works in an installation that explores borders, bodies, nationhood and exclusion that echo a hostile and controlling element of the built environment, with a jarring proximity to our domestic everyday.
From 03 May to June 1st Galerie Sultana will be hosting the third solo exhibition in Paris by visual artist Jesse Darling, winner of the Turner Prize 2023.
The Turner Prize 2023 was awarded on December 5th 2023 to Jesse Darling, a poet of matter whose installations and sculptures pay homage to all forms of rejected beings and objects, relegated to the shadows of oblivion to create a fragile and sensitive comedy.
« Reflecting the gaps, conflicts and failures of communication between human beings, they give substance to a fragility that he considers essential to the construction of his work and the construction of an identity. In this way, he leaves room for failure, and in all his work he maintains an element of the unthought and the forgotten, which testifies to his concern for others as much as it achieves the rare feat of making tangible a refusal to impose any kind of authority. The trace, visible or erased in history, constitutes one of the major axes of his work, exploring the conditions of success within the very artistic world he inhabits and rubs shoulders with.
Jesse Darling has been building up a body of work over the last twenty years that is as compelling as it is engaged, reflecting his acute awareness of institutions and social norms. At the heart of his installations, it is our places, our identities, regardless of who we are, that are at stake, and through this dialogue the conditions for understanding, or at the very least apprehending, the other emerge.
He himself never ceases to explore these margins, seeking out undefined places, areas abandoned by urbanisation, material for images and encounters with forms that create fantastic chimeras rich with unknown stories.
Through his creations, he attempts to repair a part of oblivion. His often droll and ins- pired use of banal forms and the scraps of the world reflects, behind the sensitive force of an omnipresent humour, the ability to turn any object into a relic of a celebrated memory, and an undeniable ability to bring out the spectacular. The banal becomes the exceptional, and the mundane sets the scene for a fragile but vibrant celebration, a wounded pleasure. - Guillaume Benoit in Slash Paris
