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Oh de Laval, Take your pleasure seriously, 2023
1 April – 6 May 2023Vernissage: Saturday 1 April, 5 – 8 PM4 rue des Minimes, 75003 ParisGalerie Marguo is delighted to present 'Take Your Pleasure Seriously', an exhibition of new and recent works by the Thai-Polish artist Oh de Laval. Opening during Art Paris fair week and on view from 1 April to 6 May 2023, this is the artist’s first exhibition at Galerie Marguo, following a solo presentation with the gallery at last year’s Art Paris fair.
As its directive title suggests, the paintings, drawings, and sculpture presented in this exhibition are something of a polemic against the type of commodified self-care that characterizes contemporary life. According to the artist, the notion of pleasure has little to do with the supplements, treatments, and trimmings packaged and sold to us under the broad guise of “wellness”, and everything to do with a deeply embodied understanding that hinges on the quivering boundary between sensual gratification and mortal danger. Oh de Laval broaches the limits of these oppositional forces through confectionary depictions of riotous, ribald fantasies that are alternately bizarre, cutesy, and mordantly funny.
Artist: Oh de Laval -
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Step into Oh de Laval’s saccharine universe, populated by Ducatis, hot tubs, firearms and conflagrations, wood-paneled hotel rooms, and exotic animals, and this comes clearly into view. Her vibrant tableaux, like scenes from an ever-unspooling graphic novel, are similarly packed with layers of nuance and visual contradiction.They are salty and sweet, teetering between the artist’s private interior world, with the character Oh cast in the leading role, and more universal human impulses, such as lust, rebellion, and desire.
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"I see reality as a potentiality." Even the use of blown glass, as found in the sculpture Lust has no mercy, in which a man is tossed around a sea of slobbering pink and purple tongues, seems to echo this duality. Glass, while hard and volumetric, is actually a liquid that only appears to be solid. Transparent or opaque in color, it is durable yet prone to shattering, and most dangerous when broken.
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Oh de Laval
Lust has no mercy, 2023Glass
51.5 x 75 x 48 cm (20 1/4 x 29 1/2 x 18 7/8 in) -
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Oh de Laval
It’s always words that undress me, 2023Acrylic on canvas
155 x 137 cm (61 x 54 in) -
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Oh de Laval
In the field, 2023Graphite on paper
70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in)
76 x 107 cm (framed) -
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When people are in love, they completely don’t look at any logic and they just do all these sort of things which are borderline insane. They release themselves completely and they express the craziness and insanity of it and the crazy things we would do for that. But after, when we return to the normal world, we are like “what happened, why did it happen, and then the logic comes”. (…) I would love to be in love and be extremely logical, and not that emotional. But I feel that these type of people have less time in life.— Oh de Laval
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The cinematic influence on Oh de Laval’s work is most palpable in the exhibition’s centerpiece, a lifesize triptych stretching six meters wide.Standing before it, the viewer is thrust into the midst of a motorcycle chase unfurling along an inky, empty highway, wind whooshing and lights blurring by on either side. Black-clad villains start closing in to the left and right of our central character, Oh, who insouciantly straddles the back of a motorcycle that’s in the lead, as her terrier dog threatens to gnaw off the driver’s hand who is holding her in place.Clad in a flimsy white dress, a smoke flare in one hand, her dog in the other, she throws her head back to the wind, as if to say, ‘You live more for 5 minutes going fast on a bike than other people do in all of their life.’
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Oh de Laval
Feelings fade when you refuse to set fire to the little things, 2023Acrylic on canvas
80 x 80 cm (31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in)
83 x 83 cm (framed) -
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Oh de Laval’s enduring interest in the tension between primal instinct and social conditioning is succinctly captured in I’m trained not tame (2022), wherein a regal lion jumping through a circus hoop looks back with mild concern toward the prone figure behind him. In his mouth, a severed forearm that still tightly grips the ringmaster’s whip.One of three monochromatic pencil drawings being exhibited for the first time, I'm trained not tame demonstrates Oh de Laval’s command of visual storytelling, which despite the atemporal fixity of each picture’s narrative elements, seems to unfold sequentially like a film or cartoon.
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Portrait of Oh de Laval. Photo: Eric Brain
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