"ROYAL GALA" LÉON LUCCIONI: Brussels

« Royal Gala » consists of a body of work that guides the viewer through a distorted Garden of Eden.

 

Multiple commercial/trade symbols are stripped of their original contexts to form a series of images and reincarnated objects, floating between a daydream and spiritual materialism. The name of the exhibition refers to this iconic variety of apples, the “Royal Gala”, a forbidden fruit with advertising slogans, which we are invited to bite into, in the space of an apple tree gallery. This allegory, linked to the capacity of capitalism - to digest and spit out any criticism to adapt to each mutation - transforms our faculties of judgment, making them blurry, diluted, and divided between good and evil. The logic of integrating paradoxes creates the culminating point: gas cylinders recycled into meditative instruments, commercial mantras functioning as interchangeable labels, “Forever Faster” swings as heavy and dangerous as they’re light and innocent. In this gala of temptation, this re-updated fable, the symbols recycle each other like snakes biting their tails.

 

Leo Luccioni (b.1994, France) lives and works in Brussels. His multidisciplinary practice moves seamlessly between installation, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Through colorful, pop, and flashy aesthetics, Luccioni highlights the ambiguity of our relationship with consumerism in a neoliberalism era. Between seduction and abhorrence, ephemeral and sacred, his work involves daily-life standardized products to which are given precious and fictional forms. His pieces become characters of fictional narration, comically similar to entrepreneurial storytelling. Under the disguise of humor and deliberate anti-poetry, Leo Luccioni’s work is deeply conceptual. His subtly provocative practice constantly applies capitalistic phenomenons - such as counterfeit, delocalized production of his pieces, and advertising - to the artistic field, questioning the absurdity of mass production and the illusion of material happiness of our time.

 

'Royal Gala.

 

Le jardin d’Eden des artifices,

L’île de la tentation des appétits insatiables,

Un pommier qui voit ses fruits mûrirent sur ses murs.

 

Goûter au fruit défendu.

Croquer les pommes gravées en leur chaire,

Digérer les évangiles commerciaux :

« New is old » de Back-Market fait concurrence au « Think Different » d’Apple.

Entre la tendance et l’obsolescence.

 

Jouer de la musique sur des bonbonnes de gaz.

Le jus acide des Gala qui coule sur mon visage.

S’irradier au plus proche d’un total atomique.

Entre pelures de pomme, atome chiffonné et logo défoncé aux vapeurs d’essence .

 

Faire de la balançoire sur des enclumes.

Au pied d’un pommier qui sourit.

« Forever Faster »

En équilibre entre l’ivresse et la chute.

 

« Yes Good »

Brûler les messages qui m’enflamment.

Des mots qui crament,

des mantras qui persistent.

 

Comme un serpent qui se mord la queue.

Enfermé dans un cycle où tout est possible.

Où l’excès et l’abondance côtoient le précieux et l’unique.

Où la vérité est si proche de l’illusion.

Où même les blâmes les plus virulents sont transformés en éloges.

 

« Make. Believe »

Traverser un conte de fée, une chanson auto-tunée.'

 

Text by Harold Lechien