ART-PRESENTATION: Alex Da Corte-A Season in He’ll
Alex Da Corte is known for his Pop-informed sensibility and embrace of theatricality. In his elaborate set pieces, banal objects and consumer goods serve as both actors and props in a dreamy, yet simultaneously nightmarish, landscape. Da Corte’s videos, sculptures, paintings, and installations ruminate on personal and cultural politics, alienation, and the complexities of the human experience.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art+Practice Archive
For “A Season in He’ll” his first solo exhibition In Los Angeles, Alex Da Corte is producing an ambitious three-part, site specific installation and several new works, in addition to showing four recent videos, which have never been presented together in the U.S.A. The exhibition continues the artist’s meditation on Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” (1873), a long form poem that depicts the author’s imagined descent into purgatory and his wrestling with alienation and emotional turmoil. Rimbaud wrote the text shortly after his tumultuous affair with fellow Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine ended. Replete with dense imagery and linguistic flourishes, yet scathing in its allegorical depiction of romance in decline, the text can be taken as a metaphor for embattled queer identity and the path to self actualization. The exhibition includes a number of new works by Da Corte, inspired by a variety of sources, such as the Walt Disney films and the films of the cult Italian horror director Dario Argento in which fantasy, magic, and the supernatural play significant roles in existential battles of good versus evil. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Da Corte’s 2012 trilogy of videos, named after chapters of Rimbaud’s poem. “A Season in He’ll”, “Bad Blood”, and “The Impossible” each feature an actor, who bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself, performing a series of ritualistic, mysterious, occasionally violent gestures with a tableau of props. Set against a bright monochromatic background, the videos become the space for Da Corte to trouble the performance of masculinity by testing the actor’s physical limitations in adhering to increasingly dangerous and challenging direction. This dynamic culminates in the “A Night in Hell, Part II” (2014), a hypnotic, slow motion video for which Da Corte hired a Hollywood stunt double to perform dressed as a mummy, falling from an unknown height while on fire.
Info: Art + Practice, 4339 Leimert Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 9/7-17/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, http://artandpractice.org
