Friday, 19 June 2015, will mark the opening of a group exhibition entitled Raw and Delirious. It is dedicated to contemporary art’s exploration of recalcitrant materiality. Influenced by the Internet, a significant portion of current artistic production appropriates an immaculate, clean and sterile design language. Innovative industrial techniques like 3D printing, stock photography or Chroma Key compositing are harnessed to digitally or physically mould and shape materials. These forms of artistic practice generate elegant, smoothly polished surfaces. Aesthetic disturbances, embarrassment resulting from attempts to go too far or from not going far enough, gestures of material opulence or subjective sensitivities – these artistic means and attitudes tend to be marginalized. By contrast, the exhibition Raw and Delirious unites works informed by intense and excessive processes of composition, from hand-made ‘low-tech’ to genuinely artistic materials. Here, artistic production and the quest for ‘form’ playfully showcase visual and semantic adversity; far from being seductively polished and discreet,these works are simple, raw and occasionally vulgar.
