Sade, Sin and Collective Fun: An Unpardonable Sin at Galerie Castillo/Corrales

Text and Image: Aran Cravey

Open during August - September 11, 2010

Maybe it’s the whips, maybe it’s the chains, but the Marquis de Sade has continued to spark imaginations and curiosities for centuries. The 18^th century French nobleman, who was eventually imprisoned for his alternative lifestyle and philosophies, has maintained his position as muse both for his notorious sexual perversity and his discursive, albeit transgressive, pursuit of pleasure.

Though, don’t expect to find a display of erotic fetishes upon visiting An Unpardonable Sin the new exhibition at Galerie Castillo/Corrales curated by Philippe Pirotte. In this group show eighteen artists contemplate propositions proposed by the Marquis de Sade, utilizing his literary oeuvre as a dialectic conduit. It is a means to an end, one that seeks to explore society’s capacity to connect with an aesthetic of disenchantment, despite its conventional cultural morays. Sade’s poetics of democratic pleasure provides an idiom from which to pose the question: can an aesthetics of perversion exist in a cultural atmosphere dominated by socio-political and economic demands?

However, this is not to discount an ample presence of subversive, sexual fantasy. Though to its credit, the works exhibited supersedes the stereotypic erotic clichés so often found where Sade is concerned.

In Sade for Fonts Sake, artist Paul Chan has meticulously transformed the language of Sade’s literary oeuvre into a precise font that replaces the letters with corresponding words from Sade’s texts. Taken in a larger context, the piece considers an arresting proposition on the nature of freedom and society’s dialectical control of the imagination.

The same might also be said for the exhibition as a whole. Based on aesthetics alone, the exhibition may seem to lack superficial lustre and a cohesive arc. Yet, in its collective proposition, An Unpardonable Sin proposes a more complex and compelling show that questions the nature of conventional reason and the freedom of the imagination.

An Unpardonable Sin
at Galerie Castillo/Corrales
curated by Philippe Pirotte

with works by Carla Arocha, Matthew Brannon, Pavel Büchler, Paul Chan, Wim Delvoye, Chris Evans, Luis Jacob & Chris Curreri, Aaron Flint Jamison, Owen Land, Marcel Mariën, Olivier Mosset, Tracey Rose, Pamela Rosenkranz, Nora Schmidt, Zhou Tiehai, Narcisse Tordoir, David Gheron Tretiakoff

Until September 11, 2010
castillo/corrales
65 rue Rébeval
75019 Paris