Louis-Philippe Côté

The damned. The lines are angry. They stutter and gesticulate erratically. They growl and sputter across a surface that registers their existence and their future conditions of existence. They stammer, twist, hop, and snake across the space/time of white virgin pages, violating their innocence, vomiting out of their putrid mouths the silvery traces that are the birthright of their intelligence. They writhe across the white surface in resonance with the irrational, sordid desires of a history and paternity that is at their violent origin. That has made them what they are. Those lines trace out the oozing, necrotic surface of a cynical world of pain, blood, and tears and register its existence like a colony of petrified maggots. They are, as such, also witnesses to the systemic assassination of the bewildered innocence of stunned eyes as they confront the incomprehension of their extinction. Each matrix of lines and their coalescence of fragmentary emergent forms provides an abundance of complementary information on the consequences of a cynical putrefaction of contemporary social and political life. Their presence on the whiteboard of a virgin page violates its neutrality and gives form to an epistemology and aesthetics of disgust. They are damned. They are damned because of the dirty work that they do; because of how they bear witness and how they express the unexpressive, the inexpressible; because of how they exist in the throes of a violent death and are witness to the emergence of a new historical force and its will to power. They are damned because of the way that they register the violence of that death and because of the way they expose to public view the actions of an emerging post-history and the secret desires and obscure plans of its consciousness. Yes, but they are also damned because of the truth and bewildered innocence that they carry deep within their own sentience. For these lines are also witnesses to the incomprehension of their own extinction. Louis-Philippe CôtéFrom the series WHT TRSH, 2017.Photo : courtesy of the artist Louis-Philippe CôtéFrom the series WHT TRSH, 2017.Photo : courtesy of the artist David Tomas, Louis-Philippe Côté, Thomas Fort

Louis-Philippe Côté

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