“I am so happy to be welcomed in this celebratory feeling. It’s excellent, excellent, excellent!” [1].
‘Bright Like A Diamond’ is an exhibition above any other consideration; and there is a cheerful volition to make it appear in front of your eyes as so. Many things look bigger than they are, but we will not spend any time comparing scales and directly join the festivities of a fresh and new set-up. This first-degree presentation should from here on be understood as a foundational characteristic of über-felicity, one that I could describe as a naked settlement of arguments or a sincere storytelling.
In 2013, Sarah & Charles realised the video work ‘Props For Drama: Plot Hole’, a three-channel video installation where an actor follows the instructions of the narrator of the story: what you hear is what you get. Once immersed in this text, the reader can understand this piece as a direct presentation of the theatre behind the candelabra, more than a dismantling of the theatrical illusion. You might find it explanatory to read the presentation of one of the collaborating writers in the last issue of Vogue Hommes International, “Arthur Dreyfus is handsome, young (27), intelligent, and entranced by the question of the relationship of his own intimate history to the body, seen as an aggregate of sensations and representations, shot through with narratives, images, pleasures, and suffering.”[2]
In ‘Bright Like A Diamond’, Carles Congost’s video ‘The Artist Behind The Aura’ does end with one very clear concession to fiction, when the actor impersonating the artist asserts, “Whatever it was, it was working. It did actually function pretty well and quite fast and I started to feel happy and released. I felt liberated, I felt free from some old responsibilities that suddenly were not mine anymore. I might have then seen a slight light far away. A pale but vibrant white light. The certainty of knowing that things could begin to change for all of us.”
There is a pretty big amount of joy in the visitation of popular aesthetics, it is the awakening after having been devoted to what Sarah & Charles clearly explain as ‘suspension of disbelief’. Far from any second degree, über-felicity presents a clash between the expected and the desired, the pop taste and that of a mind placed slightly off the path. What you are about to see is almost what you are expecting to view. As a matter of fact, in 2014, Carles Congost launched an EP featuring the italo-disco pop singer Ryan Paris entitled ‘Pepsi Love’. By the time this exhibition is shown, Sarah & Charles will have shot their next video work, a counter piece to ‘Props For Drama: Suspension of Disbelief’, this time framed in a very naturalistic ambience, but still busy with the real-fake idiosyncrasy of the audiovisual format.
[1] Lily McMenamy, “Google Poetics” in 89plus Marathon, exhibition co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Serpentine Galleries, 2013), see: http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/serpentine-galleries-89plus-marathon/ (accessed 22 July 2014).
[2] “Guest List”, Vogue Hommes International Paris, hors-série 19 (Spring - Summer 2014): p. 70
