Gerald Petit: Beautiful Strange

Caroline Pagès (Lisboa)
Gerald Petit: Beautiful Strange

The rumour – an action – circulates as a story or information of uncertain or doubtful truth about something. It is noise. It lives exclusively in the memory of those who shared the same space simultaneously; those present when the action took place. The premise: to instigate a rumour verbally – spread by multiple agents, it is fed until any physical reminiscence is understood as being a consequence of the rumour. The plot: the exhibition Beautiful Strange by Gerald Petit at Caroline Pagès’s transformed apartment in a traditional living neighbourhood at the centre of Lisbon, since we live in a permanent state of exception.

The painting Electric Ladyland (2009) is the starting point to construct the exhibition’s narrative, and the benchmark work that allow us to unveil the possible relations between duplicity in individuals and the vampire character. Between popular culture and popular myths. As in, for instance, the relation of Inner Vision #1 and #2 (2009) and Have you ever danced with the devil at the pale moonlight? (2009). The first subject is painted and the former is photographed. The first object refrers to the iconic pop singer Stevie Wonder, while the second to vampires. They focus on the double and on reflection.

Though, Jimi Hendrix’s album Electric Ladyland has become a staple artwork for an era, given its technical-plastic perfection in rock music that is accompanied by a striking cover photo of a group of nude woman showing all their imperfections, expressing the sexual liberation of the sixties. In the last room, a small painted portrait of Prince intertwine with Purple castle made of sand (2009), landmark photo showing an entrance to a Hollywood residence, and a reference to one of Hendrix’s songs.

Not that Petit’s works define what is the identity of a particular political system or regime, but cleverly they do verge towards the subject of aesthetics and at the role of art. It is a matter of interpreting what it was, what it is, what it can be, and what it is not, but though, as in the rumour, Gerald Petit’s works are open to a disorderly infinity of interpretations about the double and reflection while the source is lost along the way.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm 253 (88), Mayo 2009 España © Gerald Petit, "Electric Ladyland (after the 1968 LP Cover)", 2009