Love is Never Enough

With Love is Never Enough collective artist Claire Fontaine presents a new selection of works revolving around the emotional bankruptcy of our times. The title of the exhibition suggests that our need for love is almost unlimited and it cannot be satisfied by the current configuration of society but also that in our world, more than ever before, good intentions cannot be carried out without material means. The exhibition tackles the issues of exclusion and inclusion, security and fear, through the conceptual use of diverse media.

At the entrance of the gallery Claire Fontaine presents an anagram of the neon sign OPEN, an iconic objet of American commercial culture and a wonderful ready-made, because of its metaphysical implications (openness can be a moral position, an attitude that just welcomes possibilities). Her sign looks exactly like the original object, it has the same colors and the same form, but the letters that compose the word have changed position and have transformed it into a laconic and depressed negation: “nope”. NOPE advertises gratuitous negativity and generic refusal, it’s a variation of Bartleby’s famous sentence “I would prefer not to”.

Claire Fontaine will also exhibit a new series of Fresh Paintings, realized with anti-climb paint, a material that never dries and is commonly applied on walls and fences to mark the thief or the intruder with a stain that materializes his guilty intentions on his body. The paintings created through this technique always remain in a state of childhood, vulnerable and never fully finished, forever fresh.

With the neon sign You are not from the Castle the artist reproduces a memorable line from Kafka’s The Castle, where K, the foreigner, the unwelcome guest, gets reminded his status similar to the one of millions of refugees seeking hospitality in our countries these days. The full quote from the novel reads: “You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you are nothing. Or rather, unfortunately, you are something, a stranger, a man who is not wanted and is in everybody’s way, a man who is always causing trouble”.