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Bojan Sarcevic, L'Extime, 2020
exhibition views
photo: Claire Dorn

galerie frank elbaz is pleased to announce L’Extime, Bojan Sarcevic’s first solo show with the gallery. This exhibition consists of a series of new sculptures comprised of massive marble blocks.

Each marble block is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer inserted into or placed atop of it. Like alien sarcophagi, the marble blocks in a deeply veined blue, green, or rose tone seem to engulf the machines. And where you might expect to find food preserved in them, a polar topography instead forms along the walls of the freezers with an abstract noise-composition resonating through the thick of frost and ice crystals.

Three slightly larger-than-life muscular figures surround and engage with the marble sculptures. Their distinct postures and carved stone heads create an eerie unison. Contrasting with their seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figures are draped in delicate silk blouses cut in characteristically 1980’s silhouettes, while shibari rope bondage dresses their hips and feet.

The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotates how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us. On view are forms becoming something other than themselves, whether mineralogical blocks ingesting machines of artificial refrigeration or morphing figures, caught in a transformational process of petrification, as if fossilized into a new hybrid humanoid species. The whole is a study in oppositions—at once hard and delicate, ice-cold and exuberantly sultry, machinic and bodily.

Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.