The Bells Angels: Future Impact 2

For their solo exhibition at Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, the Bells Angels present a new series of paintings entitled “Crowd Processing Paintings“. This title, with its predictive overtones, plays on the algorithmic impact of crowd images as well as on the history of reproduction techniques. It reminds us of scientific articles aiming to develop new algorithms capable of tracking the individual in a crowd image and anticipating his movements, his behavior.

It is precisely of crowds and flows that the series is about: migrants trying to cross the American border in Mexico, uprisings in Belarus, or even more metaphorically, crowds of highly identified objects floating on an apocalyptic background.

These processual paintings most often take as their starting point images of crowds broadcast on the internet by news agencies. These images, which are repeated according to the news, are imposed on our screens and end up taking on a generic aspect: taken from a distance and from above, these human clouds move from one catastrophe to another.

With The Bells Angels, the appropriation of images is coupled with the appropriation of objects that populate certain paintings. Iconic medals from popular culture and advertising until the 1990s appear on the surface of the canvas. These objects that have fallen into disuse and that line our pockets evoke identity and in turn refer to the crowds. These traces of human activity come to parasitize the landscape under tension.

Thus, the canvases with shimmering chrome surfaces reflect their environment and alternate crowds, potential deserted landscapes, places of passage straight out of a science fiction story, and more abstract kinetic paintings where a vortex seems to catch us irreparably.