Launch of ‘THIS BOOK IS FOR BUY’ by Vincent Destouet

Friday 14 June, 6pm – 10pm

Drawings, painting, embroidery, photography, poetry, music, graffiti, collage, tattooing: Vincent Destouet uses a wide range of media, placing his work in a multidisciplinary field based on a dialectical relationship between image and language.

Whether drawing on the cultural industries, advertising, corporate communications, bureaucratic language or the world of childhood, Vincent Destouet develops a poor, wobbly aesthetic that aims to be free of culture (in the scholarly sense of the term), by taking what he has in front of him (he considers the ‘Bébé Soleil’ watching over the Teletubbies to be an epistemological model).

Vincent Destouet gleans elements from current events or from his own personal life (family traumas, money troubles, professional experiences, sex, nightlife, etc.) which he either exposes head-on or, on the contrary, distances himself from until they are stripped of their meaning, transformed into generic, almost transparent signifiers. A paradigmatic reflection of this approach.

Even though he draws inspiration from his own life, Vincent Destouet says he wants to talk about themes that concern us all (happiness, money, work), generalising them to the extreme, simplifying them so much that the first degree turns in on itself: insignificance is metamorphosed into irony and becomes self-reflexive. ‘Happiness is a Butterfly’, he writes on a pink fur painting dated 2023, quoting a song by Lana del Rey…

It would be a mistake to approach Vincent Destouet’s work from the angle of a form of trashy existentialism. There is an eminently conceptual and reflexive dimension in the relationship between text and image, as well as in the processes of misappropriation, photocopying, laborious repetition (the staples on the canvases) and exhaustion. Although sarcastic, the series of drawings and paintings Vincent Destouet produces speak of work and expenditure, and bear witness to the material conditions of production and existence that sometimes lead us to revolt.