Les Leçons particulières

Les leçons particulières features paintings by Augustin Katz and sculptures by François Durel. In this autofictional presentation, the artists depict their childhoods, marked by their affiliation to the lower nobility and their Catholic upbringings. From this erotic and putrid decorum, the exhibition draws seven lessons, seven particular moral laws that the artists either break or execute. Domestic and symbolist, devout and lascivious canvases interact with sculptures of sutured skins, hereditary furnitures and restraining cabinets. In their biographical confession emerges love correspondences, class culture, punishment and ardor, repressed detours and exultations.

In the beginning: François Durel and Augustin Katz live in Paris in the same apartment. We bump into them at parties, in squats, or in their artists' studios in the dormitory suburbs of Ile de France. They share the singular trait of having received an aristocratic particle, a superfluous legacy which they preferred to omit from their common names. We then began a conversation about old authoritarian families and this past that they decided to shutter. However prohibitive and puritanical the realities they introduce, their mythologies and privileges ooze sexual tension. It is from these suppressed desires that their productions are born, and which provides a fictional and critical scenario for the exhibition. To this hermetically sealed world, governed by maxims, they respond with incision and perverse fantasies. Conservatories, sports classes early-morning,  catechism at a fixed time, certificates of good conduct, correctional bulletins, anti-masturbatory cages, endogamous marriages: they keep in step... before depraving the habitus.

Lesson One. The arts of tableware thou shalt master. In Augustin Katz’s paintings, the salons of his parental home are stillborn, like long Sunday afternoons overcome by boredom, where silverware, candlesticks and Sèvres porcelain plates waver. A scene composed of bistre and gray tones is devoured by a deep black, from which arises a defrocked prelate or a lymphatic Marian apparition. It’s not a foreground painting, but a set veiled by a fine mist, a remnant of a place of constraint and prohibition, a world beyond the grave of which the elders are the guarantors. There is no room for newcomers, and nothing seems more impenetrable than the families built by time.

Lesson Two. Standing upright thou shalt. The painting is green, almost empire, borrowing from the anatomical register. It shows the back of a child suffering from scoliosis and enclosed by a hunting horn. This brass instrument heralds the season of the slaughter of game animals deep in the forests. There is urban nobility and there is rural nobility. Did this first cousin endure the weight of a cuirass during a hunting ritual? Is he a youthful, suffering symbol of the flagellants, those Catholic brotherhoods who beat their backs with whips and pungent jelly? The unconscious survival of consciously amputated parental images? A flayed man whose skin oblation (an eucharis) became the raw material for a leather worker?

Lesson Three. Thou shalt respect the territory and its limits. You don't go up to the 4th floor. On a reddish-brown or oxblood canvas, the profile of a wooden doll with a torpid eye and the pursed lip of an evil genius faces the terror of Restoration furniture. These church chairs, caquetoires, were hidden away after the revolution on the upper floors to avoid any suspicion of monarchical support and risk decapitation. They were accessed via spiral staircases as if on a ghostly pilgrimage. If you dared to enter beyond this point, you were transformed into a clown puppet in the service of the preservation of these lineages diluted by time. A haunted house, a Jungian mandala, an ocular motif, a regime of surveillance of one over the other, sitting, supplication, an irrepressible alcove à la Rembrandt, draw those who enter into a degenerative stepback. 

Francois Durel works with leather, stretched, ductile and quilted. He pulls it apart and places it in tension on cold metal edges that form ogives and hostile architectures. Formally, his pieces borrow from post-war modernism: autonomous and idealized, but their domestic and manipulable scale, their artisanal, traumatic and suffering quality, untie damaged detours and historical sinuosities. His little cardinal temples are adorned with muffled doors and confessionals, expiatory chapels and cysts, and end up figuring licentious spaces without date or geography.

Lesson Four. Thou shalt penetrate the wings of the castle. At first glance, this austere sculpture-armature based on the Castle of Chassan inspires cautious retreat, like the eruption of a lost ship caught in the onslaught of history. Then you notice that this desperate bunker is flanked by two wings that culminate in loopholes or trapezoids of sheer abyss. It could be a sadistic prison, or an infernal gay leather citadel of '50s industrial Chicago. It's an invitation to enter. We can then position ourselves at the master's service or, on the contrary, overthrow him, like the Papins sisters, domestic servants who killed their bosses in cold blood in 1933. Liaison with absolutist power, pleasure and violent assassination all support divine right.  

Lesson Five. Standing on your tiptoe you will. The display case is turned on a corner, revealing a horizontal bar belted for rigid lessons in pas-chassé. In the context of Roman nobility, the handing over of the girdle marks the entry into the nobilita. In this erotico-authoritarian sculpture, Durel exposes the co-dependency of repressive and libertine structures. Places of incarceration and asylums, where arbitrary authority over the body is experienced, coexist with rituals of pleasure and domination. The rule here is the subjugation of numbers by the martinet.

Lesson Six. Thou shall refrain from prying into family secrets. It was in the dreary reading room of the Castle of Chassan that Francois Durel retrieved this mahogany cabinet, featuring a sculpture-turret with flanked ribs whose stairs would be so dark that you’d need a torch to visit them. It would contain the Enfer of the library, where it was customary to conceal forbidden classics on the German vice: Les amitiés particulières, Julien Green, Maurice Sachs' Sabbat, Sodoma or Les secrets du Vatican. It's all about suppressed homosexual desire: neo-classical bodies, pages riddled with arrows, instruction manuals soaked with ink stains and swellings. There's a tension in this piece between the private and public body, between what's on full display and the sealed cupboards where apostates and child thieves are hidden, suborneries and notorious swindlers, prostitute merchants and stipendiaries, snitches and traitors-in-everything are hidden.

Seventh and Final Lesson: Thou shalt learn to kill. Durel’s target paintings are inspired by those hunting Saturdays, when the father, after cleaning the breech, entrusts him with his gun and instructs him to shoot a living creature. The shot is fired at a chickadee that the child artist picks up, still warm. Giving death is a transfer of power and a class ceremony that can only be assimilated over time. Patriarch and blood dogmas lead to consanguinity. When the world possessed by a few collapses, you have to know how to take up arms. You become a vicious man by temperament, cruel by instinct, ferocious by refinement.

Les leçons particulières is an exhibition that can be enjoyed on an empty stomach, or informed by what you read and what precedes it. Augustin Katz and François Durel's needlepoint art creates points of escape into which one can plunge. Staid interiors, disciplinary apparatuses and homosexual desires unfold in the architecture of disinherited castles and fin-de-race nightmares. Seniority in power is the hidden principle of hierarchies. Some people were literal and stupid enough to see them as spoiled children both privileged and dissolute, when is within that very dissolution that hierarchies are conjured. It is the place where their genius is expressed. One of the miseries of rich persons is to be deceived in everything.

Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou