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Camille Henrot liked to deal with the big and the unknown. He liked to ask big questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we do what we do? His 2014 exhibition at Chisenhale in London was about the origins of humanity and Darwinism, and his film Grosse Fatigue is about the nature of nature. But in his latest work, the French artist has turned to visuals, quiet, small and simple.
Here in this small museum on the mews, the one-time winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale has put an end to the chaos, the great chaos of his installations and videos. Instead, he’s back, he’s gone slow and he’s taken a long hard look at himself.
In the exhibition, called Musati, there are two bodies of work: a series of layered paintings, and paintings on paper. The artwork is a sketchy, digital fantasy, each a composite of images, collaged paper and real human brushes – a little-analogue experiment, a bit of Photoshop manipulation. There are pages taken from ethics books that have been copied and pasted to each other, a small painting that hides words, wrong messages from graphics programs written with angry markers.
You lose yourself trying to figure out what’s digital and analog, what’s real and what’s happening on your laptop. The list is called Dos and Don’ts, as if Henrot is trying to explain what is acceptable and what is not in public, trying to understand the rules that must be followed.
The art works best on a personal level. There are pictures of her husband and children included in one work, an X-ray of her hand in another, while hiding behind the digital images in the best art is a picture of a bill for saving oocytes (eggs saved for IVF treatment). This is not just a search for social rules and restrictions, it’s a visual journal, personal photos, questions about how to navigate the digital world when you’re depressed and stressed. The after the internet Digital art is great, but it’s the daily human excavations that make them more than beautiful digital art.
The art doesn’t need to be shaken or defined: this is a world of fantasy monsters and magical attractions. Hybrid animals run and draw simple lines, part-pig, part-man, part-donkey, part-woman. Testicles have human faces, crazy-eyed dragons lick their penises, women have penises. It’s all a surreal sexual psychodrama, a vision of individual desires spilling out of the page. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see that this entire show is an unrecognizable window into Henrot’s daily life, and you can’t create an accurate picture of daily life without including the most difficult moments of disembedding.
Although these works are not as good as Henrot put with his films, they serve a purpose. They ask: what is left when you throw out big hands and big questions? For Henrot, it is difficult, unpleasant, romantic, proud, unpleasant, everyday – things of life throughout his life.
