Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Guilty Pleasures: curated by Pierre El Khoury, a group exhibition that brings together young contemporary artists, including Sacha Cambier de Montravel, Daniel Fleur, Laslo Familari Roy, Léo Kpodzro, Renske Linders, Clément Poplineau and Alexander Skats.

 

The works of these seven artists engage in a dialogue around a common subject: that of guilty pleasures, those that stimulate a subtle tension between enjoyment and guilt. Their complexity stems from a connection between the intimate and the collective: personal tastes collide with social norms, and guilty pleasures evolve as they change. In a world marked by globalization and new technologies, they reinvent themselves, prompting us to ponder their new forms, their transgressions.

 

Fine watches, luxury leather goods, sparkling diamonds, velvet sofas and exquisite manicures are deployed across the gallery. Here, the works flirt with kitsch, which, through its deliberate excesses and artifices, invades the space like a mirror of our society, saturated with superficialities. At a time when digital culture permeates our daily lives, new forms of consumerism emerge, often ostentatious, and the subjects of the paintings reveal this evolution. The proliferation of carefully filtered images on social media has fueled new desires - irrational ones - like the quest for eternal youth, sometimes at the cost of excessive reliance on cosmetic surgery.