Cars & Bikes

After men’s beauty (Handsome, 2006, in collaboration with Gianni Romano) and men’s labor (Working Men, 2008, in collaboration with Paul Ardenne), Analix Forever gallery is creating still another very masculine exhibition centered on cars and bikes; esthetic and sexual objects fully integrated in our history, dreams and world.

Once ejected from the uterus, their first vehicle, this primitive means of transport in which they swayed while discovering the pleasure of a warm, effortless and safe trip, children and men will share a single dream: the dream of creating a comparable adventure. Thereupon, they will start building bodyworks even finer, lighter, stronger and tougher than the woman’s body: admire the glow, caress the curves… Appreciate Tuomo Manninen’s Car Show 2, these cars buried under the snow suggesting soft breasts with nipples that sometimes carelessly come out of their milky environment…

Further appreciate Robert Montgomery’s truck with angel wings, Angel, in front of the gallery during the opening. We also have to analyze the engine - as the engine is life itself. Men’s unlimited interest in understanding how both work, is illustrated by Patrick Weidmann’s explorations, when he infinitely expands parts of his engines as if he was trying to gain possession of their secrets. This fascination is also represented in Thomas Lindvig’s wrecked car – as the crash is an inherent part of the pleasure found in automobiles.

For Luc Mattenberger, engine rimes with burning and inexhaustible passion. He worships the noise, the smell, the shape and the function. His Excavatrice bicylindre four beats seams only to wait for his master who will turn it on again.

Motorbikes have a huge advantage over cars: they are bisexual. They combine the dynamic of a man’s sex, to the gentleness of feminine curves. They are fiercely aerodynamic and fly like Andrea Mastrovito’s paper Ducati Desmosedici, leaving behind a delicate red hot trail. They count many phallic extensions, such as the exhaust pipes, and they know how to leap and roar like a warrior and his horse. But they also have a conveniently accessible engine that can be explored with eyes and hands at any given time, as Xavier Veilhan invites us to do.

Motorcycles are capable of making us nostalgic of fusion like nothing else. This fusion is expressed in Elisabetta Benassi’s video, Time Code: fusion between the woman who drives and the man who follows, between Pasolini and Benassi, between time and cultures, words and images, gender and generation. Fusion again between the mythical dark knight, as much metallic as he is delicate, and the animal. Shaun Gladwell’s video, Apologies 1 – 6, shows the fusion between life and death, an existential fusion that a car could never reveal.

Cars & Bikes is a modest tribute to mechanical beauty constantly reflected in our lives and in our dreams.