Dancing with Bruno Pélassy
At Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, a celebration of the late French artist is infused with sorrow and loss.
Bruno Pélassy with Starfish, Coco Beach, Nice (1997). Courtesy Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. Photo: Laura Cottingham.
Bruno Pélassy was a draughtsman, performer, sculptor, and designer who trained in textile and jewellery design and worked for Swarovski in his early career. Before his untimely death in 2002 at age 36, he produced an array of works that reflect his interest in the biomorphic and opulent.
Some such works are presented in Pélassy's first German institutional show at Haus am Waldsee. Bruno Pélassy and the Order of the Starfish is titled after a photograph of the artist at a beach in Nice, taken by his friend Laura Cottingham. Capturing a bare-chested Pélassy accessorising with a starfish, the photograph suggests both playfulness and tenderness, traits reflected in the show it announces.
Curated by Anna Gritz, the exhibition brings together works by 11 further artists in dialogue, with Pélassy and each other. These include Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Leonor Fini, Brice Dellsperger, Jesse Darling, Beth Collar, Ull Hohn, Natacha Lesueur, James Richards, Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, and Soshiro Matsubara, who also designed the exhibition architecture. While not all directly influenced by Pélassy, these artists provide sounding boards for connected themes of interdependence, glamour, and unapologetic queerness.
The florid effrontery of Pélassy's extravagant, phallic sculptures is brilliantly contrasted with the studied fragility of Jesse Darling's contributions. They appear to leech off each other—the former brave, the latter bravely vulnerable.
The aesthetic conversations Pélassy's works prompt are wildly fruitful, not least a roomful of his untitled creatures made between 1994 and 2001. Awakened by the clapping of a gallery attendant, the biomorphic creatures proceed to scurry and titter about the floor of the gallery space, exuberantly expressing their impossible existence.
How bodies are adorned, preserved, and mourned is an inescapable element of the Order of the Starfish. Although not directly referenced in the show, Pélassy's pieces invoke the works of American painter and sculptor Paul Thek, particularly Thek's 'Technological Reliquaries' (1964–1967), also known as his 'Meat Pieces'—a series referencing Catholic reliquaries, in which body parts believed to belong to saints are preserved. Indeed, Pélassy has titled several of the works on show Reliquary. Though these are less consciously fleshy than Thek's, Pélassy's reliquaries preserve objects that evoke contact with presumably treasured bodies.
Thek and Pélassy also share a more tragic parallel; both were victims of the grim political indifference to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Their reliquaries have come to preserve their legacies and personal memories.
The show celebrates Pélassy, but as is often the case with artists of his generation, the celebration is infused with sorrow and loss. Gritz's exhibition offers a bravura display of the beauty that can be found while dancing with tears in one's eyes. —[O]
