Marseille

A recent union strike in Marseille meant that municipal garbage had not been picked up for over a week. The massive pile of trash blocking the entrance to what is usually an auction house on Rue de Paradis seemed, when I visited it, somehow telling of the exhibition inside: an accumulation of pure energy, the natural outcome of resistance to any ruling logic. Trés Marseillaise. Curated by artist Marie Angeletti and named for its street address, the group show “Paradis” offers a manic assemblage of all the art you ever liked. The fifty-two artists include younger talents like Olga Balema, Richard Sides, and Camilla Wills alongside more established names—Richard Hawkins, Henrik Olesen, Cathy Wilkes—as well as art-historical mainstays Sturtevant, Simone Forti, and John Miller. This unusual welding of magnitude and idiosyncrasy ended up highlighting the infrastructure of exhibition-making itself and the networks that tie people and art works together.

While Olesen’s gory, exquisite paintings and Hawkins’s haunting collages conveyed a dense and thorny sense of interiority, several works—Without the scales, 2021, a reflective half globe by Angharad Williams; Yuki Kimura’s stainless-steel Mirror Ball, 2019; and Dan Graham’s Skateboard Pavilion, 1989, among them—gave form to a kind of pure exteriority, making for a literal and conceptual hall of mirrors. Far from your typical collection display, “Paradis” reproduced the chaos and compulsiveness at the heart of many of these art practices: an order of crazy that the works were not only able to survive but seemed to enjoy. 

— Kristian Vistrup Madsen