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Gotscho

Born in 1945 in Le Puy (FR)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)


La baignoire de l'Opéra-Comique

1992
Wood, bronze, velvet, cotton
166 x 146 x 180 cm
Year of Purchase: 1992


After working as a decorator, fashion designer and set designer, in the 1980s Gotscho developed a plastic body of work in which the eroticism of the materials used (fabrics) and the luxurious nature of the forms (furniture, accessories…) were connected in a rather offhand way with the most elegant naturalness of appearances and illusions. Taking as his vocabulary the simplest gestures (casting off a piece of clothing onto a chair, or the floor, putting things away…), he composes hybrid objects taken from fashion and the preciousness of interior décor, which pour out their hearts in the theatre of their union.
These aesthetic stagings (dresses sewn to chairs, bits of furniture copulating, clothes merging together…) create obliging prostheses showing our intimacy’s conformity to social codes. They are like so many unconscious and symbolic traces, acts and fantasies in which the spectator’s presence starts to shed its material nature in sophisticated lighting effects.
By way of the seductive lightness of these surrealistically inclined ‘collages’ we find a mingling of the malaise and constraint of the loneliness of bodies, their absence, their inability to communicate, and their burgeois confinement. So in the vanity, wealth and late 19th century manners of the Opera Comique, two seats, back to back and embedded in a bath-tub, touch each other but without affecting one another. Both near and far, these two dignified sleepwalkers in their tomb clad in velvet seem to tell of the impossibility of a dialogue with the other.
Gotscho, just like Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, challenges the make-believe of our public representations where, through excess, the fatuousness of being is dissolved in the decadent romanticism of the consumer society.

Maïté Vissault