Chloé Delarue: TAFAA – OBSCENE TEARS

galerie frank elbaz is pleased to present TAFAA – OBSCENE TEARS, the second solo exhibition by Geneva-based artist Chloé Delarue with the gallery, on view from October 18 to December 27, 2025. This new body of work unfolds as new chapter in TAFAA (Toward A Fully Automated Appearance), an aesthetic and speculative matrix Delarue has been continuously elaborating.

 

Titled TAFAA – OBSCENE TEARS, the exhibition brings together a constellation of recent works that extend the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the reconfiguration of affect and its evolving modes of manifestation. Through Delarue’s sustained engagement with materiality, persistence, and trace, the exhibition also opens new formal and conceptual trajectories.

 

Operating within the TAFAA matrix, Delarue’s practice interrogates the accelerating automation of systems and their infiltration into the domains of human perception and affects. Within this expanded framework, she develops distinct subseries—some ongoing, others singular—each probing specific facets of this entangled terrain between the technological and the affective, the artificial and the organic, the collective and the personal.

 

Dichotomy is a structuring principle throughout Delarue’s work. Temporal disjunctions, contradictory sentiments, and hybrid materialities coexist to produce forms that mirror the fractured, often uncanny nature of contemporary experience. Her works reflect a reality increasingly shaped by virtual and alternative states, capturing the turbulence and destabilization of a world in flux.

 

At the heart of the exhibition, TAFAA – Daisy Chain (Unnecessary Doubt) presents a sculptural assemblage composed of a dead oak trunk replica, the skeletal frame of an IT server rack, and a mummified animal simulacrum from whose mouth escapes a delicate thread of argon plasma. This allegorical transi, marked by strange iridescent oxidations, evokes not an end but a mode of decomposition through which images and meanings are reanimated. Delarue references a “generative necro-aesthetic”— an aesthetics grounded in the technical recomposition of dead cultural matter, where generative systems absorb the remnants to form new modes of presence.

 

Materiality is central to her sculptural vocabulary. Latex—used as a capturing surface—acts as a skin of memory, later sealed under resin, which forms a new, autonomous body. Many of the works incorporate light structures that bathe the installation in a soft amber glow, intensifying the sensorial experience. Works from the TAFAA – UNNECESSARY DOUBT (SNITCH) subseries extend these formal concerns, creating latex-resin structures from vegetal components. Leaves are inscribed with drawn imagery drawn from virtual visual vocabularies, appropriating natural elements through digital codes. Decontextualized yet still recognizable, this iconography— transposed onto an unexpected material support—functions as a potent metaphor for Delarue’s ongoing exploration of the endless circulation of images: dislocated, distorted, yet persistently reemerging in new hybrid forms.

 

With TAFAA – OBSCENE TEARS, Chloé Delarue pursues a poetic and visually compelling exploration of the evolving nature of representation—a dynamic process of generation, decomposition, and recomposition in which the human affective self encounters the emergence of the artificial and the superficial. What lies beyond this rupture remains open, as new operative modes quietly yet inexorably reshape the contours of our human experience.