Through simultaneously simple, minimal yet spectacular gestures, Jesse Darling’s sculptures and installations  reveal the hidden stories that haunt the objects, materials, and forms that populate our daily lives. Working primarily with industrial materials, used objects, or rubbish collected from the places where he exhibits, he assembles them into unusual compositions, hybrid relics, or fantastical landscapes, accentuating the marks of time on their physical condition, between exhaustion and degradation, as if to emphasise their fragility and precariousness.

Stretched, twisted metal barriers have lost their coercive function and rest on their frail legs like tired insects. Bouquets of multicolored flowers suffocate in display cases lined up as if for a funeral parade. Office shelves buckle under the weight of administrative files like animals with shells that are too heavy. Wooden and Plexiglas lockers filled with intimate relics (stickers, flowers, trash, torn images) form a monument in the form of anonymous and popular ex-votos. Garlands of objects suspended from strings (fly strips, children’s toys and clothes, shoes, dishcloths, party items, dustpans…) celebrate the rediscovered pride of neglected accessories.

Tinted with a form of critical melancholy or alert romanticism, his work connects us with the moving precariousness of the materials that surround us, but also with the very systems of production, consumption, and domination that made them possible. This poetic recycling of reality, which could be likened to a practice of disarmament, momentarily distances their violence as if to better neutralize, analyze, and understand it. In this way, these fossilized structures, ravaged by history, express in their physical form an implacable indictment of the myths and symbols that form the foundations of our cultures, the fatigue of dominant narratives challenged by the vitality of alternative histories, and the necessary renewal of values in a damaged world.

Exhaustion, disability and the vulnerability of things are staged in opposition to the destructive logic of triumphant productivism. Without particular complacency or fascination, fragility is considered a dignified condition of existence, intrinsic to humanity as well as to its constructions, to lives as well as to structures, to nature as well as to narratives.

At the Palais de Tokyo, Jesse Darling presents a new production on the scale of the building, its past and present history, its geography, and the context in which this season of exhibitions takes place. Subtly taking into account the architecture of the space and its symbolism, the immersive work is conceived as a landscape that is at once moving, sensory, and enveloping, without distinguishing, as is his custom, between poetry and intelligence, celebration and criticism, intuition and intensity.