reviews chrIS evanS
Chris evAns: As simple
As Your life used to Be
Store, London
13 September – 20 october
Artist Chris Evans asked former Italian politicians
to visualise an artwork that would embody
the idea of ‘sacrifice’. How the question was
formulated – or why it was ‘sacrifice’ that was
put to the bureaucrats – is left unexplained in
his show at Store. Certainly the turbulence of
the peninsula’s contemporary history is more
associated with sedition and overthrow than heroic
virtues. Perhaps surprisingly, these establishment
designs, after being realised by Evans as a series
of maquettes and airbrush paintings, draw on
once-avant-garde modern visual vocabulary,
from surrealist abstraction to Kinetic art. Warm
Hermaphrodite (all works 2007) is the delicate
sculpture of a phallus-like lily stemming from a
pipe. It seems to evoke some buried secrets in
the life of Oscar Mammi, the ex-member of the
Italian Republican Party who proposed it. The
piece pokes at the pale Magrittean airbrushed
painting Portrait of Thomas Carlyle as a Climbing
Wall. Repeat Horizon, a psychedelic geometric abstraction painted on a Venetian blind (fruit of the imagination
Repeat Horizon, 2007 (proposed
by emanuele macaluso, former member
of former Italian Communist Party member Emanuele Macaluso), gives to the whole gallery a sad atmosphere of the Italian communist party),
of outdated utopia. Despite their formal differences, these works share an unspeakable feeling of absurdity.
airbrush on oak slats. courtesy
the artist and Store, London
The sleek, impersonal airbrushed technique reduces them to commemorations of the compromises often
synonymous with long political careers.
The project’s second part is a short film showing the tribulations of an adolescent love affair. The heroine
rambles in an empty school, torn between her feelings for her inamorato and the growing fear that he is about
to commit a grave mistake. Alone in the gymnasium, the boy himself murmurs worrying nonsense, snippets of
John Robinson’s eighteenth-century text Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All Religions and Government in Europe.
Conspiracy theories have never been more topical, yet the piece remains appealingly hermetic, a meditation
on the inner tremors of human passion. The As Simple as Your Life Used to Be project will come full circle in
its final section, which is programmed to take place in an underperforming school in the outskirts of Rome. To
stimulate the little motivated kids, Evans will present the sculptures designed by their former political leaders,
ironically highlighting the redeeming power often attributed to art by educational and corporate structures.
Evans’s project is a variation on traditional themes of institutional critique: the influence of elites on
cultural production and the conflict of interest between personal aspiration and political commitment. For this
exhibition, he short-circuits the system, turning political leaders into creators. This process comes directly from
the artist’s ongoing project Radical Loyalty, in which Evans coaxed managers of international corporations
into designing sculptures that embodied for them the concept of loyalty. The resultant works, like the ones
on display at Store, are pleasing and bland, an inoffensive shell for a radical concept, but their strength is born
out of this contrast. Alongside Carey Young or Matthieu Laurette, Chris Evans belongs to a contemporary
generation of artists allowing play and poetry to infuse the realm of institutional critique, a lightness sometimes
missing from the work of their predecessors of the 1960s and 70s. Coline Milliard
127 Artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 127 2/11/07 12:14:55
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