For his presentation at the Petit Palais as part of the Art Basel Paris Public Program, Jesse Darling reconfigures key works from his 2023 Turner Prize-winning exhibition, alongside a site-specific iteration of his ongoing floral installation Untitled (still life) (2018 — ongoing). Jesse Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using a ‘materialist poetics’ to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live. 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.
In Jesse Darling’s Come on England (2023/2024), metal barriers that are typically used to inhibit free movement are instead contorted into a kind of dancing procession. Using this incarnation of division and official control against itself, Darling reveals the inherent vulnerability in such power structures. The work conveys the flimsiness of controlling infrastructures with both humor and grief. Untitled (still life) echoes such notions of decay, illustrating the capture and commoditization of life by art in a contemporary vanitas, as bouquets of flowers encased in vitrines gradually decompose.
Press: Review of Vanitas by Peter Brock for émergent magazine.
Image credits: Jesse Darling, Vanitas, 2024, Art Basel Paris, Petit Palais, installation view. Photo: Gregory Copitet.