Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Alexandre Diop
Austrian, German, French, Senegalese; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Kavi Gupta Gallery (Exhibition: Matter of Fact: Material as a Political Act)
36%
A world without Children will rot. 2021-22. Old furniture parts, fabric, latex, glitter, rubber bands, staples, string, wire, nails, tacks, found metal, leather, pastel, canvas, wood chips, wicker, found paper, oil, and acrylic on wood
Mess of a picture, doing nothing to convey to its viewer why it ever would have needed to contain as much stuff as it does. What is the pastel scratchwork adding to the arrangement of junk? How is the junk accenting the draftsmanship? The piece's main problem, actually, is the fact that it's a picture at all, rather than a sculpture or an installation or something stranger yet; this is what makes it feel so busy and full without justification, and what makes its several elements appear so disjunct. (It's as if a handful of unrelated artworks have been compacted together at the dump.) If the piece transgressed the picture plane a little bit more than it does, or if it deployed some extrapictorial poetics by way of reference or conceptualization, then maybe it could get away with being as bad as it is as a painting. But Diop seems to think he can work within the pictorial tradition (the wall-hung rectangular format implies this) and still get away with such half-assed mark-making as is represented by those sophomoric oculi and the scribbles all around them. With his trash-collage all he did was complexify his canvas; such complexity would seem to demand more, not less, painterly acumen. (TFS, 2025)