« Sans titre invites » Ginny on Frederick with Jack O'Brien, Paris

Sans titre is pleased to inaugurate its new collaborative initiative « Sans titre invites ». Once a year, an other gallery or a project space will have the opportunity to conceive a show in our courtyard room. For the first collaboration, Sans titre invites Ginny on Frederick who is showing British artist Jack O’Brien.

« When talking to Jack about his exhibition, I came to realise I was getting older. In the most beautiful way. I don’t want to linger for too long on the relationship I have with his work, but his practice is one that has been literally with me for a few years now – not only in art spaces but also pubs and outdoors. A marker of the time spent with the work are the evolution of the questions I ask been asking myself about Jack’s practice. One question that used to come back was how queerness infused and manifested in the works? Through his manipulation of images, material, found objects and textures. Well, I guess that shifted recently. I am now more interested in asking myself: how does the work conceal queerness? How does it refuse queer legibility?

The omnipresence of plastic wrapping in the exhibition speaks to this very desire: to hide while showing – but just enough, not too much. See-through plastic wrap holds this duality: it can protect while revealing (you can refer to the promotional image used for the show, which is the one behind the two wall works). Actually, plastic wrap often makes you want to see more, to have more: the thin shiny layer is only one obstacle towards property. Plastic wrap also has the ability to neutralise. Meaning something wrapped generally loses agency, it is stuck. However, Jack’s pieces in “The Answer” have movement or rather seek movement.

Jack got, indeed, interested in the motif of the fugue in Baroque music, and the interplay between the main melody and theme (the subject) and its echoes and counterpoints (the answer). In other words: ways to imitate without synchronising, to produce more complex melodies. The multiple reflecting metal balls interspersed in all components of the exhibition enact this very gesture through the images they contain: same subject (yourself) but not the exact same perspective. Try to hide from them, they will always catch you. While they remind me of Lutz Bacher’s Cyclops (2017), they also act like punctuation, a punctuation willing to become music more than silence (see the way they are placed on neons acting like a musical score in one of the wall-works).

I also started to look at the metal balls as if they were bullets, ammunition too big for a gun and too small for a cannon. Fuga, holding several of the metal balls thus turns into a telescope and a weapon, ready to fire at anyone who would try to decipher what it is. Though its title is already part of a potential answer. »

Cédric Fauq

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Jack O’Brien (b.1993) lives and works in London. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: To More Time, Lockup International, London, UK (2022); The Influence of Emotions On Associated Reactions, with Henryk Morel (1937-68), Polamagnetczne Gallery, Warsaw, PL (2022) and Waiting For The Sun To Kill Me, Ginny on Frederick, London, UK (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: Chômage Technique, Lovaas Projects, Munich, DE (2022); Something is Burning, Kunsthalle Bratislava, SK (2022); An Insular Rococo, Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2022); Sky-blue and green, V.O Curations, London, UK (2020); Strange Messengers, Peres Projects, Berlin, DE (2018).

Ginny on Frederick was founded in Farringdon, London in 2021 by Frederick Powell. Focused on emergent art, Ginny on Frederick aims to be a space for experimentation and critical development. Ginny on Frederick has been featured in Frieze, The New York Times, ArtForum and The Art Newspaper.