The invitation for the exhibition “Collectibles” by Demian Kern presents In the desert (all works 2023), a painting of four shadow shapes suggesting cartoon animals. In the foreground of the invitation image, a trio of small, crystalline figures stand on a table and stare at the canvas, evoking an eerie pathos.
At the gallery, this same painting is associated with three other canvases hung on the walls of the small rectangular space. All but one are executed with thinly applied greyish oil paint, along with faint tints of the type of spectral colors produced by reflections. Elegant Beauty 1 represents a dog in three-quarter profile, while Elegant Beauty 2 depicts a slender cat, its tail detached in an ornamental caprice. These gray paintings model the silhouettes of light cast by the menagerie of glass onto the invitation – a sort of chamber game version of Plato’s cave. Meanwhile, the last canvas, You make my sun shine (rain)is a monochrome with a tint resembling that of a green screen, capable of hosting any type of content in post-production.
These gestures could be seen as a reference to the canonical characteristic of image production and epistemology: the lens dividing what East of what is represented. But Kern’s titles also reinforce Benjamin’s notion of a commodity, performing with insistence on being loved (and bought). If works of art differ from kitsch in their ability to resist the desire of the bourgeois subject to reduce them to what Adorno called “objects of caresses”, this exhibition signals the disordered intimacy of works of art as collectibles and merchandise as art.
