Hind: €7500
Two faux leather panels with embossed text, Tom Ford Ombré Leather Parfum, aluminium frames and handrail.
The work “untitled” (idée fixe) consists of three visual elements: two faux leather panels with text embossings and an aluminium handrail with a sticker of Idéfix, the dog from the French comic book series Astérix, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. The faux leather is also perfumed with Tom Ford’s Ombré Leather Parfum, which is often described as one of the most “leather-like” fragrances. The term idée fixe derives from 19th-century psychology as an early attempt to conceptualise neurosis, obsessions, and monomania; fixations in the form of inner speech and visions that don’t let go and haunt the mind. The term was also used by artists and composers of the time, for example Hector Berlioz, in his Symphonie fantastique (1830), to describe a repeating theme in the work, representing the object of his unrequited love. Later, Richard Wagner used the term Leitmotiv for a similar purpose. Compulsions, obscure authoritative orders appearing and insisting in thought, share similarities with music, in that both colour and saturate our experience. In the work “untitled” (idée fixe), the words extrude from an otherwise flat leather surface as if pointing toward an image that remains concealed; the object of the fixation doesn’t show itself. The doubling of the panels, the repetition of the language, and the image open up questions of singularity and non-identicality of seemingly identical things. Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of inframince—often translated as infra-thin—to describe the smallest gaps and differences between things, the idea that there is always something in between and that from this difference emerges something new and unexpected. This doubling also happens on another material level in the work, when the two faux leather panels are infused with a perfume that mimics the scent of real leather. By layering one imitation over another, the work produces a kind of double negative, but overexposing this artificiality still doesn’t make the leather genuine. The work stays in the realm of appearances. The resemblance of the panels to billboards, the lingering scent of perfume, as if someone had just passed by, and the handrail, bearing greasy marks and traces of use, situate the work within the atmosphere of public space: streets and empty stations where exterior and interior, public and private, intertwine.
