TRIPLE TAKE
Start date: 12/02/2022
End date: 24/03/2022
Location: Wilde Gallery, Basel
Wilde is pleased to present Triple Take, a group exhibition that addresses surreal moments in domestic spaces, feelings of ambiguity, time suspended and a need to escape. Triple Take ventures to capture the zeitgeist of the past few years.
Now in the third year of the pandemic, no one could have anticipated how their lives would be upended. For the first time since it began, Basel will again be able to celebrate Fasnacht, the city’s pride and joy, a moment of scaring away the winter, donning a mask, and escaping into the surreal world that is the carnival. Domestic spaces also took on another life, serving as guarded refuges and circumspect sanctuaries.
Entering the gallery, one encounters Jan Fabre’s Devil Mask (2002). The gold–coated sculpture is shaped like a human sacrum, which in Prehispanic Mesoamerica was considered the “sacred bone,” representing a portal or doorway permitting the translocation of shamans, spirits, and deities between worlds or dimensions of the cosmos. The work echoes the tradition of these communities using animal pelvises to form ceremonial masks.
This need to escape our realities is perhaps unique to our species and was documented by Yann Gross and Arguiñe Escandón during their travels to the Peruvian Amazon. There they photographed shamans performing indigenous Ayahuasca rituals. The other image depicts a young woman holding a native Aloe Vera over her face as a mask. In the work of Antoine Roegiers, a film adapted from the painting Squelette arrêtant masques (1891) by James Ensor, a partially–masked skeleton in a red coat stands behind a masked woman, as she dances with another skeleton, giving the macabre subjects an air of festivity.
This notion of escaping from our domestic realities is particularly compelling in the work of Lou Masduraud, which comprises four air vents located in different rooms around the gallery, serving as psychological and physical portals. One such work, a black–and–red–glazed ceramic sculpture, appears to have been pried open as if someone were trying to enter or exit. Adjacent to it, a work of Per Barclay features a frame with a protruding steel staircase, evoking a passage.
And on the opposite wall, Open Door (Berlin), 2011 by Florian Graf depicts just this. Two large paintings by Léopold Rabus, Pêche en Haute Savoie, 2017 and Poules avec guirlande, 2022 teeter on the boundaries of fantasy and reality. One, featuring a nearly empty room, shows wooden floorboards, with light coming from above and a perspective that seems both impossible and disorienting. Rabus’s large–scale painting of chickens, these flightless birds, echoes this need to escape but being unable to. Trapped as domesticated and farmed animals, their future already pre– determined.
