Expired Reality

May 13 - July 8, 2023
Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery, Paris

For their fourth solo exhibition at Suzanne Tarasieve, Recycle Group continues to explore the dual reality— material and digital—we live amongst. Their works, made of diverted industrial materials and recycled plastics, skillfully play with the codes of traditional sculpture to comment on the impact of new technologies and online media on our lifestyles. 

They have transformed the gallery space into a Forest of Expired Links, those URLs that lead nowhere, a space in which man is doomed to wander eternally. These invalid links come from a variety of sources, including the websites of various state agencies regarding Covid precautions during the period of confinement, which were constantly updated and constantly rendered obsolete. 

The panorama presented at the back of the gallery refers to “Null Island,” a place both real and fictional, whose GPS coordinates are 0.0. A seascape, composed of thousands of plastic cells, appears and disappears according to the viewers’ movements. The result is a “coded” image, elusive in its entirety and constantly changing.
To create Paradise Gardens, Recycle Group used an artificial intelligence to create an illustration based on a text that described a utopian country, with no state and no social structures, in which everyone lives happily and in harmony with others. The image thus created by the AI, reinterpreted by the artists, evokes a Garden of Eden. The high reliefs, in thermoformed wire mesh, inspired by Classical statuary, show the impasses of the modern world and new technologies with a powerful sense of drama. The mesh figures, similar to 3D modeling frames, are both present and absent. The idea of dematerialization and disembodiment is present in their new black plastic works, empty shells that raise the question of the omnipresence of packaging. 

Dumpsters also evoke the worrying question of waste treatment, a major issue of our time, which the artists humorously place in an alternative art history. 

Recyle Group adopts the role of an enthusiastic futurologist concerned by the rapid evolution of technology and the questions it raises. 

Photos by Rebecca Fanuele