Chloé Delarue: TAFAA - SYCAMORE RABBIT (Give 'Em The Love Tonight II)

 

It is a perilous exercise to want to give meaning to poetic brilliance. In the same way that there is something infinitely reductive in wanting to comment on a work’s minute detail, poetic exegesis contains a strong deceptive potential. To flatten out its means of expression is to risk letting its terms run aground of a certain magic — such terms which, precisely, confer the power to the work to speak beyond its own vocabulary.

 

If I go by way of this reflection to introduce Chloé Delarue’s first exhibition at galerie frank elbaz, it is because I felt a pleasurable curiosity when she told me the title of this new stage in its cycle — TAFAA (Toward A Fully Automated Appearance), this technical acronym linked to her work since the 2010s. A feeling that is difficult to explain: the result of a rapprochement, relatively cryptic, of two names that seemingly designate nothing other than a type of tree and a mammal. Similarly to the way that I’ve always been amazed by certain sculptors assembling unrelated ready-made objects,  this particular use of words seems equally able to open semantic gaps, to catalyze the imagination. Sycamore Rabbit and its outcome of suave evocation could already be a fragment of work in itself, retaining as many references to contemporary mythologies as to a story beyond age — like a shift in the timeline.