Valérie Belin, Andres Serrano and Jérôme Zonder in La Beauté du Diable

"You gave me your mud and I turned it into gold"

Charles Baudelaire

 

As a continuation of the exhibition The Grey Man, presented at the Casino Luxembourg by Benjamin Bianciotto, The Beauty of the Devil proposes to explore the presence of Satan in contemporary art from the angle of his figuration and his metamorphoses.

Beyond the representations explicitly referring to the Devil or his symbolism, the exhibition aims to question the aestheticization of Evil through works that operate a transmutation of the "repulsive" in aesthetic enjoyment.

By questioning our certainties and confronting them with the structural resistances of Western societies, these works have an undeniable political dimension. They operate a reversal of taste: a transgressive alchemy of sorts.

Taking also support on the "non serviam" decreed by Lucifer in a true song of revolt, the artists refuse in their turn to let themselves be controlled by an authority considered as unjust or arbitrary and to submit to the fatality.

Lucifer is confused with Prometheus, and the angel "carrier of light" bringing illumination and freedom to creators in a post-romantic and symbolist heritage. By the double movement of unveiling the horrible (like the Apocalypse, which means Revelation) and its revival under seductive clothes, they seem to affirm their refusal of the pain and the ugliness of the world.

But the exhibition also questions the role and place of art in our current societies. The recent creation is perfectly conscious that the danger lurks under the attractive varnish; it also knows how to play of this ambiguity, making up the reality to better charm us, adorning itself with ornaments of the capitalist and advertising perdition.

Finally, The Beauty of the Devil will not evade the religious dimension, of the demonization of the contemporary art to its capacity to revive the debate within secularized cultures. Ambivalent, polysemic and cathartic, the exhibition highlights the oxymoron contained in its very title, assumes and defends this fascination with Faustian effluvia.