“Tourbe Chunky” — Guillaume Adjutor Provost in Conversation with Toshio Matsumoto
CMagazine | REVIEW- ISSUE 151| April 14, 2022
Guillaume Adjutor Provost, Cioran Slapstick [vomit], 2020.
“Throughout the Main Space of TRUCK, Guillaume Adjutor Provost conceives of a hypercapitalist society as an ailing body, whose deepening inequalities leave behind puddles of vomit, a leaden tongue, and a rib cage constructed of sliced X-rays. While “Tourbe Chunky” continually references this failing body-economy, the body is never fully revealed to us. Like a horror that lurks just beyond the camera lens in a film, or in the closet, we only see the detritus and the fluids that this body-society leaves behind.
Within the cork sculpture titled “Blurring Big Tongue” (2019) a glossectomy results in a heavy tongue hanging under industrial light, disconnected from the mouth that used to houseit. Reaching for the concrete floor, swathes of cork are punched with lead, contrasted with curved X-ray strips that gracefully evoke the image of a rib cage. Grinning teeth and arched spines are exposed by the X-rays, vulnerable and ready for evaluation. Steel cables pierce through the X-rays, linking this rib cage to the cork tongue, like steel pins that hold together broken joints and torn ligaments. I lean in close to examine the lead stamps while consulting the exhibition maps, in a gesture that mirrors a doctor examining a strange mole, or perhaps an autopsy. As a spectator-doctor to the ailing body-economy, my attempt at a diagnosis is just to name what has always been there: dysfunctional growth at the expense of others.”