"Perhaps this is the ultimate commodity on sale at the Megastore: the fantasy that class divisions are suspended." Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (2002)1
Built in 1886, the Café des Glaces—named for its numerous mirrors—is among the architectural masterpieces of the town of Tonnerre, in Burgundy. Adorned with moldings, high ceilings, and large windows in Belle Époque style, it successively served as a salon, ballroom, and hotel, remaining active until 2000. Fueled by the rise of consumer culture, the café as a social institution established itself as a space of sociability marked by relative social mixing, where a variety of drinks were consumed—notably that colonial commodity, once luxury and now widely democratized: coffee2.
Today, the Café des Glaces stands as an faded symbol of the provincial middle class, a symbol of the decline of rural France. Thus, if "taste classifies and classifies the classifier,"3 it establishes a process of symbolic hierarchy among different social classes. Good taste emerges as the prerogative of women, especially in social spaces such as the Café des Glaces. As Penny Sparke explains in As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste4, material ostentation through "accessories of distinction" positions consumer culture as both desirable and normative.
By occupying the ground floor—once the bar of the Café—the exhibition Realife 2 resonates with the site's past and present uses. The luminous sculptures by Haydée Marin & Camille Besson reflect the gendered tensions of modernist design, navigating between calls to order and desires for emancipation. They share, with Gilles Jacot's photo series Clone, a minimal, refined aesthetic. These photographs, made during a shoot for a Swiss jewelry brand—one of the artist's "money jobs"—are partially obscured with Tipp-Ex and paper to anonymize the faces. Through this intervention, the artist highlights the hidden, informal economy behind artistic labor and exposes the unseen realities behind the desire for a sense of belonging.
This tension drives Anne Bourse's creation of her "nuits corrompues" ("corrupted nights"), in which one sinks into the stereotypical imagery of a fantasized, aspirational party. Similarly, the paintings of Lorenza Longhi and her Corsage sculptures evoke a sense of aftermath—the moment after the guests have left, when only the remains of superficial opulence and ostentatious glamour linger. The decorative snails presented by A Maior—an exhibition program hosted within a home décor shop in Viseu, Portugal—are kitschy, mass-produced goods: globalized commodities that homogenize consumer desires.
Beyond their bright appearance, Gina Folly adorns cardboard boxes—containers designed for the circulation of goods, aimed at efficiency and optimization in a dematerialized, service-oriented economy—with preserved flowers. The works are accompanied by quotes from an astrology application, offering mantras meant to ease daily life, emotional needs that are as alienating as they are profitable: "Abjection is big business in a culture in which you're supposed to feel lousy about feeling lousy,"5 as Rhonda Lieberman puts it. Meanwhile, Ethan Assouline's bar-side sketches are placed on the Café's large mirrors. They speak to imagined forms of refusal—false promises of joy embedded in capitalist ideology, shaping both urban and rural life and their illusory charms.
Mathilde Cassan
