Exhibition Preview: Jérôme Chazeix - Zeix Desire

The world which populates Jérôme Chazeix’s (1976, Nantua/France) drawings – animals, models, stars and ornaments, sparingly-coloured and succinctly outlined – piles up already in his studio: in glass cupboards, where normally one finds collected cups, Chazeix has placed animals as if to provoke our expression of sympathy (oh, isn’t it sweet!). One looks at foxes, elks or birds lacking anything unfamiliar. They are condemned to an existence as cuddled pets. In between lie genuine deer horns and flower vases bringing post-war cosiness to mind. Above, over this popular world, the objectively-scientifically stuffed bird and other dermatoplastic processed animals are being naturally displayed.
It is true that for the time being the stuffed bird has nothing to do with an image, but with a way of recording. Because science ascertains with the help of these objects and a clip box the content of the world. Yet as disposition – and yet again as image (this is a pheasant!), it should not be absent. After all, the production of the popular picture flood has its starting point in the stuffed fauna. In the corners and shelves of Chazeix’s far too small studio pile up animal atlases, books about birds and goods that are being collected in order to use their illustrations and schematized drawings. The taxonomic will to record and the naivety of the look, which seeks to erase every complexity, exert a magical attraction on Chazeix. He pursues image research.
The seriousness of his venture becomes visible when one is given files in the hand to leaf through. In them one can find, thematically organized, copies of cosmonaut photos, ad booklets, fashion magazines, textbooks, medicine books, tables and catalogues of contemporary art. “I’m through with the National Library” adds Chazeix. One begins to suspect, that it is about an inventory of popular images of the “unfamiliar” in the world, not inferior to science regarding its extent.
It is no surprise then, that Chazeix pulls out atlases in order to show us that he scientifically assembles his hotchpotch of cosmos, model, porno, animal and ornament in self-made notebooks. There are atlases (with candy papers, tags and milk labels with a cow face, like an object feeding us happily) or atlases with various modulations of the female image, pornographic varieties included.
Therefore, the picture formulas which Chazeix has mostly by chance come across (“I have bought this fox at a Chinese market”) are being injected in order reservoirs of his own.