MADRID.- Sabrina Amrani is presenting HYPERMOODY, the first solo show in Spain of the artist duo :mentalKLINIK, presenting works that defy the definition of 'Painting’.
Tempered glass, polished aluminum panels, water-based emulsion, liquid polyurethane with different glitters, silver confetti, robot vacuum cleaners, ASMR audio and air diffusers spritzing champagne scented essence. Welcome to HYPERMOODY, a show by the artist duo :mentalKLINIK, oxymoronically titled to underscore the split between life as lived and as advertised. Mobilizing these and other elements :mentalKLINIK creates an object-laden, digitally-aided, gallery-wide sensorium. The environment’s ostensible payload: dozens of paintings that, in point of fact, are not (conventional) paintings at all.
Foursquare wall-hanging objects the artists have dubbed “showoff paintings,” each series presents the medium not as an age-old radical métier but as the cliché of an art market commodity—while sarcastically evoking tiny variations animating several decades of abstract painting styles. There are the “Wet Paintings” (transparent resin pours on sheets of tempered glass), the “Soft Paintings” (polyester woven fabric mounted onto canvas or constituting its own support), the “Dirty Mirror Paintings” (glass surfaces printed and mirrored with Mark Rothko-like horizons), the “Hyper-Chromatic Madness Paintings” (bent polyester solar film made to look like crumpled metal) and, last but not least, the “Disgustingly Awful Paintings” (everything-and-the-kitchen-sink compositions made with resin and glitter on aluminum). As a final flourish to finger our golden age of vapid financialized excess the artists deploy several pounds of confetti—signaling either carnival’s end or, lamer still (cue The Velvet Underground & Nico), all tomorrow’s parties.
With HYPERMOODY, the duo continues its ongoing campaign of non-compliance by introducing new aesthetic objects and experiences that above all prize an unending stream of heterogeneous and unconventional materials. To this end the artists focus on humanity’s reptilian attraction to glittering and seductive surfaces to invoke commodity fetishism—the idea that manufactured objects, like talismans, possess sacred or supernatural powers—while also underscoring the planet’s ubiquitous iPhone zeitgeist: the slippery, gleaming, mirrored surface of data-driven consumption and capital accumulation that characterizes our present age.
Taken together, the entire exhibition resembles a Xanadu-like pleasure palace, a gleaming showroom floor so exclusive it resembles a Maserati dealership or a super-premium art fair like Art Basel Miami Beach—the trade show that, arguably, kicked off the beginning of the end of art and the start of the art market. It’s no accident that :mentalKLINIK should look to echo this and similar sales platforms: after all, they remain staging grounds for art’s cooptation by entertainment, celebrity, screen culture, and high and alternative finance. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic a young American artist named Nikita Gale portrayed ABMB in terms that, not so accidentally, also describes this :mentalKLINIK exhibition perfectly: “It’s like being inside of Instagram... It feels like everything’s compressed in a bizarre way. Art, commerce, capitalism, celebrity culture, beach culture, party culture. It’s pretty surreal.”
Adapted version from the text Art is HYPERMOODY: The World According to :mentalKLINIK by Christian Viveros-Fauné
'HAPPILY DIZZY' is produced in collaboration with AETHER Conceptual Fragrances
