Artist Jesse Darling breaks the silence on the dysfunctional body

‘Crevé’ is French for punctured, burst, exhausted or dead. It invites a consonantal comparison: crude, cracked, crumpled. I find it to be an effective exhibition title. It describes a general state of affairs, as well as a specific artistic practice. The transparency of the title mirrors the content of the exhibition: both biographical and didactic.

I usually avoid reducing someone’s formal artistic choices to biography, as it often risks emptying work of content in favour of creating a fetishised portrait of the artist. However, in this new exhibition at Marseille’s Friche la Belle de Mai, biography becomes the (seemingly intentional) instructive backbone narrating the show. The artist currently lives with a severe neurological condition that restricts movement, among other impairments. Yet, in a text accompanying the exhibition, Darling acknowledges that they might appear as “the relatively able-bodied, relatively functional, white-skinned face of the difficult but fascinating idea of the disabled and dysfunctional body.” While asserting the right to decline responsibility to represent disability, the work can nonetheless become a common voice for the exhaustion of resistance, a breaking of the silence on what it is to struggle

The whole exhibition, curated by Triangle France, is contained within the single room of the Panorama Space at Friche. Noticeably sparser than the artist’s recent show at Tate Britain, the floor is littered with folded paper planes; rendered in shiny, sheet metal and grounded. Occupying almost the entire floor space, they hinder movement considerably. Similarly collapsed on the ground are the banal admin folders piled atop one another, weighted with concrete between their covers. Crudely sculpted plaster feet line the walls and Perspex boxes of spring flowers punctuate the middle section of the space. It is a collection of highly readable works which speak openly not only of a personal experience of feeling weighed down, but also what the artist calls an acknowledgement that the “weight behind things assigned a certain lightness.”

CREVÉ follows Darling’s first institutional solo show at Tate Britain last year, and leads up to the artist’s participation in the upcoming Venice Biennale, opening in May. But amidst all of this seeming success, the work comes on top of parenthood and chronic illness. So it seems somewhat contradictory to produce such a labour-intensive exhibition, littered with sheet metal aeroplanes and concrete-filled binders, as a means of stating exhaustion.

A large portion of the work on show had to be produced by local artists Almendra Wilfrid and Arthur Eskenazi, as Darling was physically unable to travel to Marseille for the installation or the opening. Both Darling and the curator have openly discussed how the show came to fruition on Instagram following the opening, allowing for the sometimes-opaque institutional practices and the demands of exhibition making to be laid bare. If the exhibition is partly a critique of the so-called art world and its demands, this frankness also highlights a number of specific elements that are the object of their critique.

Until now, Jesse Darling has operated with a degree of opacity, often prioritising counter histories over personal ones. The artist now presents an exhibition which seems to succumb to transparency. This openness may be the path of least resistance, but it is also an acerbic critique of the institutional world in which artists are forced to exist.

CREVÉ is up at Panorama de la Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, until 2 June 2019