August 2010, Denis Darzacq @ Kopeikin Gallery

Dennis Darzacq
Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery

Denis Darzacq: Hyper
Kopeikin Gallery
2766 S. La Cienega Ave.
Culver City, CA. 90034
June 10 through August 21, 2010
and September 18 through October 23, 2010



Imagine flying like some demented super hero down the aisles of a grocery store, skirting the onslaught of bodies at Target on a Saturday afternoon, or lazily drifting above the roses at your local florist. Sounds vaguely exciting and somewhat perilous. In his newest body of photographs, Denis Darzacq has done all of the above, having captured both the motion and stasis of the human form in a variety of strangely discordant physical poses “imposed” quite literally into specific urban settings.

Darzacq creates outrageous fictional narratives that have neither a beginning nor an end, but exist squarely in the middle of a scene, a fractured story that has no obvious resolution. His main focus is the disjunction between physical elements, i.e. a body floating weightless in an all-too prosaic and familiar surrounding. These images are as goofy and irreverent as they are culturally significant and exist as visual commentaries about consumerism and the all-too-human desire for constant consumption. Perhaps the near predatory pursuit of gadgets and “stuff” will one day result in a permanent state of soullessness where we all just float mercenarily from urban storefront to storefront filling our pockets. 

The bodies that populate these images often appear disconnected from themselves as though inhabited by a foreign presence, a ghost or poltergeist perhaps, and because the subject’s faces are mostly obscured, the physical gestures themselves become the focal point; the tilt of the head or an outstretched arm takes on new relevance. Certain images appear to resonate more on the level of color and composition rather than any political statement. For example, in image #10, a beautiful young man appears almost to be sleeping, his body lilting softly to the right of the image. Behind him are several bolts of fabric that seem oddly to complement his deep ebony skin as though the colors were extracted from his imagination and built up around him. This work in particular has a quality of disassociation because the colors of the fabric are solid and uniformly smooth and without any patterning bringing the eye back again and again to the figure.

Still other images in the show directly engage with compositional elements, but are more politically and culturally charged. In image #4, another young man floats inexplicably in front of a wall of color coordinated wall paper tubes, his clothing drained of all color, his body strangely limp and lifeless as though the act of looking at these consumerist items quite literally “drained him.” Within each of these images is an attention to both color and form, which the artist suggests is a means of achieving cultural anonymity as if to imply that the longer one stands among these objects, the more weightless, indeed soulless one becomes. It’s not the objects themselves that are powerful, but our own willingness to ascribe meaning to them, to publicly assert their significance in our lives even at the risk of losing ourselves to them completely. 

Dennis Darzacq
Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery

 
Dennis Darzacq
Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery