"Consume Me" a solo exhibition by Adeline Calosci

Adeline Calosci is a French visual artist born in St. Cloud in 1980. From a family in the theatre, she began studying drama at the age of 15 and proceeded the following decade at the Florent, the Aquaviva School and the Paris Conservatoire Superior d’Art Dramatique. During her career as an actress she worked with great directors such as Catherine Hiégel and George Lavaudant, before returning briefly to the Comédie-Française.

Between 2005 and 2008 Adeline Calosci developed several projects in the media, including a short format series produced by Ari Tordjman which was broadcasted on TF6 for 3 years. Passionate about graffiti and drawing since she was a teenager, in 2008 Adeline Calosci followed several courses in graphic art and then created works inspired by old-school tattoos, elements that will later mark a large part of her work. Her first creations consisted tattooing style images of celebrities from the 50s, such as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, works from which she made a name for herself in Paris. Later Adeline became renown for a series of sculptures that attack the symbols of luxury brands and welcomed with great success by international collectors. (“Empire 22” series, exhibited in 2014).

From 2010, Adeline Calosci devoted herself to painting using different techniques such as aerography, spray bombing. Her work questions the links between consumption and desire, through a combination of references to Western pop culture and the modern iconography of anime, manga and the kawaii universe.

Various symbols of iconic, commercial and global consumption serve as a means of expression for Adeline Calosci to evoke the futility, the omnipresence and the illusory effect of desire, as it is constructed in contemporary supra-publicised society.

Her characters – childish icons, superheroes, naive girls, whose features recall the bishoujou (Japanese word for “beautiful girl”) are often represented under the sign of fatality or ambivalence: between recklessness and the tragic, amidst excess drive and deprivation, separating naive desire and hyper-sexualisation. Adeline Calosci even comes to define her work as being focused on the paradoxes of desire:

“To satisfy a desire is a dangerous issue: even if it can lead us to self-fulfilment, it can destroy us, become tragic. Desire is always confronted with the norm, conventions and the forbidden. Desire invites us either to transgress an order or, on the contrary, to follow it. It is from these tensions that we are forced to build ourselves as individuals “.

These technical aspects of her creations can be associated with the Superflat movement: flat images, solid and flattened backgrounds on a surface defined by sharp lines and a lack of depth. Indeed, like other artists who recall the codes of anaesthetised and infantilised society (Japanese neo pop), Adeline Calosci’s work evokes the fabric of inaccessible ideals and the playful desire that drives today’s individuals towards a quest.
The artist is known for her neopop icons that recall the codes of anesthetised and infantilised society, presents her work, for the first time in Asia, in the exhibition “Consume Me”. This time, the artist explores the theme of the frenetic medicalisation that characterises our consumer societies. An over-medicalisation, a bearer of happiness and superpowers, which pushes individuals today to a quest for imaginary, fantasised, alienating and ultimately illusory gratifications.

Adeline Calosci’s work questions in a general way the links between consumption and desire, evoking, throughout her creative universe, the incessant fabric of inaccessible ideals that dominate our daily lives. Her characters (child icons, superheroes, “bishoujou”) are, however, often represented under the sign of fatality or ambivalence: between insouciance and tragedy, between excess drive and deprivation, between naive desire and hyper-sexualisation.

The tragic, present in most of her works, evokes the reverse of the scenery of a world that presents itself as a desirable-fairytale-like, optimistic and idealistic world that is nevertheless carrying constraints, precariousness and finiteness.

In the exhibition “Consume Me” Adeline Calosci echoes the hypermodern era we are going through, characterised by the illusory effect of the happiness industry, the “welfare pill” being the ultimate expression of happiness dependent, paradoxical and potentially tyrannical.