INTERVIEW WITH SATAN | Thibault Tourmente + 5IVE TIMES FLOYD | Jim Camp
INTERVIEW WITH SATAN | Thibault Tourmente
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5IVE TIMES FLOYD | Jim Camp
ARTISTS’ RECEPTION: September 28, 7–9 PM
EXHIBITION: September 28 – October 26, 2024
This exhibition features two artists from different sides of the Atlantic, with very different backgrounds, who have never met. While they may be complete strangers, their obsession with found vernacular images and DIY book making creates a familial bond. Thibault Tourmente (showing in the main room), based on the coast of Southwest France, has produced a seemingly endless catalog of handmade zines utilizing photocopy machines and imagery sourced from old medical textbooks, encyclopedias and American celebrity magazines. In contrast Jim Camp (showing in the project room), now based in Phoenix, AZ, has been scavenging flea markets and thrift stores for as long as he can recall, searching for snapshots he considers accidental masterpieces. Inspired by California midcentury artist Wallace Berman's poetry zine "Semina" he creates his own titled "Volta" using the labor intensive and antiquated process of letterpress to achieve a beautifully crafted hand-bound edition.
INTERVIEW WITH SATAN | Thibault Tourmente
Images are nothing, yet they build worlds within the world. In the simulacrum of visual reason, they have invaded us like a kind of contemporary virus. Even text has become image. From cave paintings to AI-generated images, they have come to dominate. As a new, self-generating language, we've been reduced to the status of reproductive organs, repeatedly, even compulsively, contemplating the fruit of this spectacle of infinite simulacra.
The industrialization and optimization of methods for printing and reproducing images, followed by the democratization of the Internet and the miniaturization of circuits enabling exponential storage, have allowed this new virus to spread right into our pockets, invading our fantasies, constructing our thoughts and influencing our decisions.
Like environmental pollution, is it time for an image ecology? Perhaps it's time to take a deep breath, and become a critic of this flow, an unreasonable mix of algorithmic advertising and scripted memories.
For his new exhibition “Interview with Satan” at These Days (Los Angeles) this late September, Thibault Tourmente presents new compositions based on old issues of Interview magazine, an American magazine created by Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga in 1961. An influential magazine, it was initially devoted to fringe cinema, but soon extended to the arts and celebrities in general.
Using original, even collector's, back issues, TT reprints on the pages, in a sort of blast, other visuals from underground culture. In this way, he poses as iconographer as well as iconoclast. In a way he is inviting us into the hell of images. Superimpositions of meaning, random connections, a kind of programmatic madness. In these large-scale compositions, a new meaning is offered to us. From the bowels of his photocopiers, Tourmente invites us into a jig of analogous analogies, concretely we're looking at nothing but subliminal images. Through his obsessive gaze, he confronts the gravity of images and their lost meanings. Delirious with his Xerox, as if passed through a mental filter, the images become psychological once again. And beyond seduction, obsession slowly takes over. As we peruse these prints, these snippets of texts and slogans, visuals and graphics, photos and drawings, we are reminded that the power of images lies in the paradox that they are nothing, and yet within us, they create an inner world.
5IVE TIMES FLOYD | Jim Camp
"Sometimes results arrive from things unplanned. Take for instance, stumbling across an original publicity still of two-time heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson in the middle of a box of junk at a flea market in Southern California. I really can’t explain why some things Found speak to me so clearly. Floyd’s picture gets turned into a gel-transfer diptych on the backs of boards removed from a broken, hardbound book. But, for some reason, that’s not enough: a book needs to be assembled with Floyd’s image as the central motif. Still not enough: so, combine other found imagery, text, and items into this book in the same way Joseph Cornell did with his Manual of Marvels, turning a simple book into an object. This can’t be a one-off, either. A short run, limited to no more than something I could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Then, with forty hand-sewn into wraps, the only way to really make it right is to add a hardbound edition as well. Still not enough. Somehow, multiple paintings evolved directly from the Rauschenberg / Warhol / Berman sphere of influence using the same found elements in the books. Art from the book as opposed to a book coming from art. As many times as I could pull it off—which, in this case, was 5ive." - Jim Camp