This work was part of L’Extime, Bojan Sarcevic’s first solo show at galerie frank elbaz. The massive marble is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer. Like an alien sarcophagus, the marble block in a deeply veined rose tone seems to engulf the machine. And where you might expect to find food preserved in it, a polar topography instead forms along the walls of the freezer with an abstract noise-composition resonating through the thick of frost and ice crystals. A slightly larger-than-life muscular figure surrounds and engages with the marble sculpture. Its distinct posture and carved stone head create an eerie unison. Contrasting with its seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figure is draped in a delicate silk blouse cut in a characteristically 1980’s silhouette, while shibari rope bondage dresses its hips and feet.
The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotates how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us. On view are forms becoming something other than themselves, whether mineralogical blocks ingesting machines of artificial refrigeration or morphing figures, caught in a transformational process of petrification, as if fossilized into a new hybrid humanoid species. The whole is a study in oppositions—at once hard and delicate, ice-cold and exuberantly sultry, machinic and bodily. Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.