While Pierre Allain’s “Soap Opera” may draw conceptual inspiration from the company-sponsored origins of this titular genre, it’s the numb, haunting tone of his work that more closely evokes the soap opera’s atmosphere of emptiness, with characters like capped prisoners pacing through claustrophobic rooms in states of perpetual frustration, longing and doom.
In an adjacent gallery space, three white obelisks stand along the walls of a tiny gray-carpeted room. The sculptures, all titled Skins screen, 2023 – are each coated with a stucco-like sprayable chemical called Apromud P150, a superabsorbent polymer used in a variety of hygiene and cleaning products. These vampiric, minimalist cuboids literally suck the humidity out of the room.
Beyond the sculptures comes the muffled sound of Tip of the tongue2022. Composed of audio clips taken from an online forum for people searching for the forgotten movies and TV shows that traumatized them as children, the article airs weak attempts at crowdsourced closure via fuzzy descriptions of “a black screen and a , as if someone was inside the TV,” or “a creepy rooster with high-pitched alphabet soup.” The surreal memories, read in a chilling mantra by Allain, play quietly from a salvaged hospital intercom.
In Self-diagnosis 1-9, 2022-23, the artist translates flash photos of a stainless steel sink – taken at a nearby bar where he works part-time – into a series of small graphite drawings. The impeccably clean subject is delicately disentangled by the meticulous activity of Allain’s pencil. We are left to contemplate what other repetitive and anxious frequencies might be buzzing under white noise.
