We were invited to a private view in a pub along the road. Two artists were collaborating - a sculptor and a street artist. Olivier Duhec creates metal pieces which may be lamps or (very loosely) ornaments, themed on space fiction or animals, or animated TV characters. Mygalo's paintings are similarly rather steampunk, some themed on skulls, some more brutal and explicitly sexual. It makes for an exciting show.
Nathalie and I walked down together, admiring the work of another local artist - the wind - whose powers had swept a chair from her balcony the night before, and, we now saw, had totally trashed a building-site hoarding along the road, leaving the mud and excavations open to passers-by, like a mute invitation to get into trouble.
The pub was an interesting place to have an art show. The owners are already committed to Mexican death-cult art, so the bar is decorated with a series of brightly coloured skulls.
But the expo on the other side of the room basically consisted of Mygalo's paintings behind a long table set out with Duhec's sculptures. During the evening one of the paintings sold at €2000 which cheered everyone up. 'Everyone' consisted of a couple of dozen mecs and some very pretty ladies of various ages.
Gradually, the secrets of the works revealed themselves. There were some bunches of metal roses with glossy petals and sharp thorns - only the black ones contained tiny skulls in their centres. A shining cubic metal lamp (containing a sphere which very slightly emerged from its vertical constraints) could in fact be opened up so that the light shone upwards as well as forwards. A glass and steel table was supported by a complex and polished animation of Atlas, who practically groaned under the weight of the top, like the obedient servant of an unseen dominatrix. Some stickers on a side table featuring details of Mygalo's slave-girl nude were free to pick up - one disguises her face but shows her arse and vagina, another closes in on this sensitive area but as she pees, her thumb (or someone else's) is penetrating her arse. Another sticker shows a coy skeletal couple who've been together for 357 years. These tiny giveaways are both cheerful and disturbing, and free art at an PV is a new one on me.
There were an array of glittering model machines - tiny motorbikes deconstructed and then put back together like calligraphic scrolls, deeply desirable.
The star sculpture was hanging in the air above us, a model of a popular French TV spaceship from the 1960s - Albator - a fabulous complexity of guns, decks, thrusters, portholes, welding, ports, and more. This model itself weighs over 100 kilos, and anyone who knows the US Starship Enterprise will understand how childhood hero-worship for an animated fantasy spaceship can translate into a lifelong obsession and desire.
Outside France, you may not have heard of Albator, or Duhec or Mygalos. But this show has an electric streak of recognition all through it. The stickers and death's head paintings are workings on an eternal theme - like Holbein's Ambassadors with its skull at the foot, or Titian's nudes laid out for consumption and trashing. And the sculptures are all about light and dark, and how heroes fight against evil. Rembrandt would have recognised all of it. I loved it, and came away with some stickers, a tiny motorbikey thing, and a red rose (without a skull).
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