Softalism is the first solo exhibition of the artist duo touche-touche.
It’s a room, malleable in every sense. Individual sculptures in space merge into the decor of a bedroom that through two large windows opens itself up to the street. Often hand-carved and manually rubbed in flexible coating, the charge that touch gives us, is formulated in ‘Softalism’. Public interiority. Leaning strongly on hybrid resemblance, every piece—be it a bookshelf or a vase—gets unexpectedly slippery upon closer inspection.
The solo show happened in Everyday Gallery YYY Antwerp,
The visitors entered the gallery through a group show called 'TUMULUS'
Aluminium, Urethan, polyether foam, pigments, wood...
“Underneath the ground, there is bedrock, magma, liquid iron, solid iron. Above the sky, there is mostly nothing, apart from a few hot, lonely stars and planets scattered around in space. One could say that between, beneath and above there is the earth’s surface, your surface, the atmosphere. But from a materialist perspective, it is more accurate to say that between the iron core and the lonely stars there is the synaptic cleft.” — Anna Zett, Artificial Gut Feeling
It’s a room, malleable in every sense. Individual sculptures in space merge into the decor of a bedroom that through two large windows opens itself up to the street. Often hand-carved and manually rubbed in flexible coating, the charge that touch gives us, is formulated in ‘Softalism’. Public interiority. Leaning strongly on hybrid resemblance, every piece—be it a bookshelf or a vase—gets unexpectedly slippery upon closer inspection.
The practice of touche—touche transports the viewer to an empire of dreamlike apparition and tactile explorations. Lacquered wooden tiles, foam rocks; simulated textures toy with bodily perception and reality slowly resides to a secondary position. Manufactured in intricate detail, the artists use contemporary materials and techniques, to create new fiction for daily scenarios. Each imagined scene is a reinterpretation of existing cultural traditions; their environments are a free fall in tangible reality.
touche—touche’s sculptures and center-stage bed convey a sensuality—abundantly haptic, otherworldly.
Here, the mind is never fully asleep, it is resting on an extended sense of relation. The artificial—the ‘almost’—triggers an internal, a peaking flip. Start and arrival of the mind's stationary excursions fall into one place that infinitely expands. The scene induces the viewer to the arousal threshold of wakefulness and sleep.
Text by Céline Mathieu
Pictures by Silvia Cappellari
Pictures by Seppe Elewaut
Curated by Boris Devis
touche-touche duo with Carolin Gieszner
TUMULUS,group show with: Leo Luccioni, Thomas Ballouhey and Yoel Pitowski
2020