With Capsules, Luxembourg Art Week takes over vacant spaces, store windows, and façades in the city center. Each activated space will be visible from the street around the clock.
Capsules benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Corentin Darré
Chagrin
Location
Centre Brasseur
36-38, Grand-Rue, L-1660 Luxembourg
Art Walk Challenge
With the kind support of Fischbach
The starting point for ‘Chagrin’ is a short story written by the artist, ‘Avant que les champs ne brûlent’, in which he imagines the story of a homosexual couple wrongly accused of being responsible for a drought. Borrowing from multiple cinematic references — the futuristic westerns Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) or the Westworld series — the village he depicts, in the middle of cornfields, becomes the contemporary theater of violence and mourning, between homocide and ecocide.
In ‘Je brûle pour toi’, 2024 and ‘À tes risques et périls’, 2024, he recomposes the elements of the setting in bits and pieces: the facades of the weathered wooden houses, the sign of the bar, the intercom and the mailbox, in which he scatters messages of threat or love. In this way, he combines the aesthetics of 1990s American slashers with the cheesy ambience of romance novels, building dramatic tension in increments.
In the course of inlaid canvases, in small windows or between the boards of a barn (‘Première poignée de terre’, 2024), we catch glimpses of sequences from the lives of the two lovers : embrace, sleep, attack, tear and funeral. Through these short glimpses, the artist questions the voyeurism that unfolds in the experience of observation, questioning the cathartic relationship between viewer and image.
The photographic aesthetic, inherited from video games, leads the representations to frozen, sometimes theatricalized, deliberately exaggerated postures: the hand on the hat of the lonely cowboy, or the shadow of the accusers with brandished pitchforks (‘La mort est dans le pré’, 2024). Varnished with resin, applied to the canvases like a screen, the artist imparts a smooth, glossy texture to the works, like digital images. This material, while adding a tactile and erotic dimension, plays on the idea of the image freezing in a state of desire and secrecy.
Using the figure of the cowboy, Darré takes a queer approach to Hollywood cosmogony, in the manner of The Secret of Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) or Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, 1968), stories of desire and prohibitions, terrible or parodic. By revisiting this symbolic, heteronormative character as a gay fetish, he questions the existence of minoritized bodies in rural areas and interrogates a white trash social and political dimension. In this way, Darré invites us to enter the territory of fiction, offering a behind-the-scenes experience.
Anne Vimeux and Elise Poitevin, 2024
Based on a process of writing, through tales or short stories, Corentin Darré (1996, France) creates installations that materialize an actantial structure within the exhibition. His sculptural works take the form of architectural elements such as a cabin, a dock, or a façade, like spaces that have escaped from fiction. Within these fragments, he inserts images, still or moving, words, and objects: items that reveal the unfolding narrative, acting as a compass or guide that accompanies the visitor. Corentin Darré reinterprets legends and figures that shape collective imagination. By reversing the moral intent of their original warnings, he invents new mythical representations and questions society’s attitudes toward otherness. He tells the stories of those who have been accused, hunted, and condemned: homosexuals, queer people, marginalized beings. He twists myths, overturns dominant moral codes, and transforms curses into mirrors of social violence. In his narratives, the monster is the one born of rejection, the being forced into wandering by blows and insults. Between tragedy and resistance, his works weave new mythologies where queerness becomes central, finding a place within the folds of a collective imagination that has long been hostile to it.
Interview of Corentin Darré
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