frieze // Nicholas Ceccaldi at House of Gaga
House of Gaga, Mexico City, Mexico
The mass-produced paintings that adorn dentists’ waiting rooms and model show homes are inoffensive but, invariably, depressingly dull. The absence of any specific referents in their anodyne landscapes renders obvious their assembly-line fabrication. They call to mind modernist Hermann Broch’s definition of kitsch as the product of ‘an emergent bourgeoisie caught between contradictory values: an asceticism of work on the one hand and an exaltation of feeling on the other’.
Image credit: Nicolas Ceccaldi, Beleth Videl, 2016, mixed media , 92 x 122 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and House of Gaga, Mexico City
