• 1 April – 6 May 2023 Vernissage: Saturday 1 April, 5 – 8 PM 4 rue des Minimes, 75003 Paris...
    Oh de Laval, Take your pleasure seriously, 2023
     
    1 April  6 May 2023
    Vernissage: Saturday 1 April, 5 – 8 PM
    4 rue des Minimes, 75003 Paris
     

    Galerie Marguo is delighted to present 'Take Your Pleasure Seriously', an exhibition of new and recent works by the Thai-Polish artist Oh de Laval. Opening during Art Paris fair week and on view from 1 April to 6 May 2023, this is the artist’s first exhibition at Galerie Marguo, following a solo presentation with the gallery at last year’s Art Paris fair.

     

    As its directive title suggests, the paintings, drawings, and sculpture presented in this exhibition are something of a polemic against the type of commodified self-care that characterizes contemporary life. According to the artist, the notion of pleasure has little to do with the supplements, treatments, and trimmings packaged and sold to us under the broad guise of “wellness”, and everything to do with a deeply embodied understanding that hinges on the quivering boundary between sensual gratification and mortal danger. Oh de Laval broaches the limits of these oppositional forces through confectionary depictions of riotous, ribald fantasies that are alternately bizarre, cutesy, and mordantly funny.

     
    Artist: Oh de Laval
    Full Press Release: English · French
  • Step into Oh de Laval’s saccharine universe, populated by Ducatis, hot tubs, firearms and conflagrations, wood-paneled hotel rooms, and exotic animals, and this comes clearly into view. Her vibrant tableaux, like scenes from an ever-unspooling graphic novel, are similarly packed with layers of nuance and visual contradiction.
     
    They are salty and sweet, teetering between the artist’s private interior world, with the character Oh cast in the leading role, and more universal human impulses, such as lust, rebellion, and desire.
  • "I see reality as a potentiality." Even the use of blown glass, as found in the sculpture Lust has no mercy, in which a man is tossed around a sea of slobbering pink and purple tongues, seems to echo this duality. Glass, while hard and volumetric, is actually a liquid that only appears to be solid. Transparent or opaque in color, it is durable yet prone to shattering, and most dangerous when broken.
  • Oh de Laval, Lust has no mercy, 2023

    Oh de Laval

    Lust has no mercy, 2023
    Glass
    51.5 x 75 x 48 cm (20 1/4 x 29 1/2 x 18 7/8 in)
  • Oh de Laval, It’s always words that undress me, 2023

    Oh de Laval

    It’s always words that undress me, 2023
    Acrylic on canvas
    155 x 137 cm (61 x 54 in)
  • Formally, dazzling palettes of fiery oranges, bubblegum pinks, and aquamarines belie a measured approach to color (each painting is executed...

    Formally, dazzling palettes of fiery oranges, bubblegum pinks, and aquamarines belie a measured approach to color (each painting is executed using only two to three pigments). A seemingly flat illustrative style, which is in fact built up layer by layer with acrylic paint, dissipates into abstract forms upon closer inspection, melting before one’s eyes into a field of striations, spheres, stains, and dashes.

     

    The last hug, 2022
    Acrylic on canvas
    160 x 153 cm (63 x 60 1/4 in)
  • Oh de Laval, In the field, 2023

    Oh de Laval

    In the field, 2023
    Graphite on paper
    70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in)
    76 x 107 cm (framed)
  • When people are in love, they completely don’t look at any logic and they just do all these sort of things which are borderline insane. They release themselves completely and they express the craziness and insanity of it and the crazy things we would do for that. But after, when we return to the normal world, we are like “what happened, why did it happen, and then the logic comes”. (…) I would love to be in love and be extremely logical, and not that emotional. But I feel that these type of people have less time in life.
     
    — Oh de Laval
  • The cinematic influence on Oh de Laval’s work is most palpable in the exhibition’s centerpiece, a lifesize triptych stretching six meters wide. 
     
    Standing before it, the viewer is thrust into the midst of a motorcycle chase unfurling along an inky, empty highway, wind whooshing and lights blurring by on either side. Black-clad villains start closing in to the left and right of our central character, Oh, who insouciantly straddles the back of a motorcycle that’s in the lead, as her terrier dog threatens to gnaw off the driver’s hand who is holding her in place.
     
    Clad in a flimsy white dress, a smoke flare in one hand, her dog in the other, she throws her head back to the wind, as if to say, ‘You live more for 5 minutes going fast on a bike than other people do in all of their life.’
  • Oh de Laval, Feelings fade when you refuse to set fire to the little things, 2023

    Oh de Laval

    Feelings fade when you refuse to set fire to the little things, 2023
    Acrylic on canvas
    80 x 80 cm (31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in)
    83 x 83 cm (framed)
  • Oh de Laval’s enduring interest in the tension between primal instinct and social conditioning is succinctly captured in I’m trained not tame (2022), wherein a regal lion jumping through a circus hoop looks back with mild concern toward the prone figure behind him. In his mouth, a severed forearm that still tightly grips the ringmaster’s whip.
     
    One of three monochromatic pencil drawings being exhibited for the first time, I'm trained not tame demonstrates Oh de Laval’s command of visual storytelling, which despite the atemporal fixity of each picture’s narrative elements, seems to unfold sequentially like a film or cartoon.
  • ABOUT THE ARTIST
    Portrait of Oh de Laval. Photo: Eric Brain

    ABOUT THE ARTIST

     

    Oh de Laval (b.1990, Warsaw, PL) earned a degree in sociology from the University of Warsaw in 2016 before moving to London to pursue painting. In 2021 she held her first solo exhibition ‘Wild Things Happen in Stillness’ at Unit London and a solo presentation with Galerie Marguo at Art Paris fair in 2022. de Laval has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world including Bridge Mogura Gallery, Hajimemashite! (Tokyo, 2023), Galerie Droste, Chronicles 3 at KPM Berlin (Berlin, 2021), Nassima Landau Art Foundation (Tel Aviv, 2022), Asia Art Center cur. Melanie Lum (Taipei, 2021), Xiao Foundation (Hong Kong, 2021), Villa Merkel (Esslingen, 2021), Galerie Droste (Paris, 2020), and Unit London (London, 2020).

    Oh de Laval's work is held in the collections of AMMA Foundation (Mexico City, MX), Dib Museum (Bangkok, Thailand), Rudin Dewoody Collection (Florida, US), Studio Berkhain Museum (Berlin, DE); Emergentes Art Collection (Lebanon), and the Xiao Foundation (Hong Kong).

     

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