Charlie Masson: Unplugged

A keen beholder of his surroundings, Masson draws on everyday life and seemingly mundane objects to transcend their apparent banality. In doing so, he highlights the underlying, metaphysical meanings that the artifacts shaping tangible reality can hold. Subtly imbuing the ordinary world with poetic significance, he invites the audience to reconsider what may have long been overlooked or rendered indifferent.

While the title of the exhibition inevitably recalls the eponymous television MTV program, it is not a nostalgic reference to the artist's childhood, but rather an allusion to the act of “stripping something back to its essentials”. In a way, these paintings operate as an acoustic rendition of the present technological landscape: everyday digital interfaces cleaned out of their functionality and displayed for contemplation, revealing their exposed qualities.

This series of oil paintings representing light switches, electrical outlets and plugs found in the most contrasting locations are thus brought together under a singular denominator. In this sense the exhibition space becomes a harbor of eclectic stories breaking their apparent geographical, historical and architectural differences to form a coherent corpus of items not only interrelated by virtue of function and design, but by spatial semiotics.