“Milo” is the name of a boy Thomas met in Vienna and fell in love with. At the time, he promised him to call his next exhibition Milo, and that’s the show that is opening today.
In this show, there are fifteen new pieces. Seven of them form a round: Milo and friends. Thomas has a sense of community. It is a farandole of tricycles that the ordeal of confinement h as n ot allowed to b e patched u p. No matter, the basis of his work is collaborative and he has given them to a bike specialist to repair. These tricycles are ridden by seven queerdos, Pee-wee Hermans trained in a round, ready to cross the country on three wheels for a vanilla milkshake or a bubble-tea. If motorsports, sliding or speed sports suffer from a testosterone foot- print, his tricycles would be their campy counterparts, props for little Ponies, fashion-sports equipment for those from Faggotland. They are topped by soft, faded figures, e-boys reading Dazed and Confused, listening to Hannah Diamond and mixing tartan, rainbow gaiters, shiny coverings. They are Milo’s friends, little Monsters from Vienna that wear make-up that’s gone bad. They are dressed with T-shirts with the initials PMS standing for Premenstrual Syndrome realized by the artist Marlie Mul. It is haunted-couture. Their feet are blistered from drinking tea and eating gelatin. They are flabby, shabby. More like Lynda Benglis sculpture-larvae than Robert Morris macho-rugged devices. They are humans-velocipedes escaped from a provincial Pride, led by Thomas Liu Le Lann under the influence of fairies and Minnie-mousses from Claes Oldenburg.
Thomas likes dummies. In fact, there is one. Training Part 3 is a large baby-pink blown-glass pacifier made in Vincent Breed’s workshop. It is a palliative object, a learning method for baby teeth but in this case slightly more dangerous. When we see it we think about his appetite for pink, soft and ductile candies. Thomas likes sweet Tagada and Antonin Carême’s cream pastries. They remind him of the founding act of the Virgin Mary feeding her child, or the She-wolf of the Rome Capitol giving the pie to Remus and Romulus. Moreover, during his previous stay in Rome —between two visits to the gay bar Incogni-to—Liu Le Lann was obsessed with the lactation of Saint Bernard. The pacifier is fragile and is placed on a base of wooden pallets. The wood is dry and absorbs the excretions of the salivary glands. It is a delicate sensation between delight and misery.
A shellfish claw covered in grey bath towels— probably stolen during one of his visits to the Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne holds a bunch of seaweed. It’s a rereading of a funeral wreath. They are underwater Armani Chrysanthemum. When you see them, you think of Cosima von Bonin, but you can also slip further away. Perhaps this clip is dedicated to the artistic director Howard Ashman. He was a Broadway man behind the Disney Studios revival in the late 1980s. The creator of the crypto-queer film “The Little Mermaid” and its fantabu- lous lobster Sebastian, he died of AIDS in 1991 and was relegated to the studio’s dustbin. Soft Heroes are too often forgotten.
Deftones #2, Deftones #3, both canvas with vinyl eyes protruding from tapestry made by Vladimir Boson, give us a look that leaves us unsure whether they are friendly or compassionate. You might think they’re brave, a bit dumb, but at times they seem to be shot through with a kind of mathematical gumption that amounts to genius. One thinks of Spyro the dragon, the video-game star, coming to pierce a cocaine-chic design by Gaetano Pesce. They could also appear in Bikini Bottom, the marine city of SpongeBob, with their Bertrand-Lavier cartoonish allure. But the titles put us on the track of Deftones fandom. The Sacramento nu-metal band’s bassist Chi Cheng was left in a coma following a severe car accident in November of 2008 and died in 2013. Their latest album is adorned with the same look between tenderness and torpor that seems to belong to the late musician. There are superb men who are humbled by the elevation and the decline of their rivals. Chi Cheng, another soft hero?
Love to death! There’s this wooden shoe box with a pair of Demonia V-CREEPER-516 with a black glass sole (Amor e Morte II). It is not an object of temptation, a new pair of Boolenciaga, it is an epitaph! A parallelepiped where gothic scrolls have replaced the words. One thinks of a funeral oration by Marc Almond, or the Italian roman-tic opera composer Gaetano Donizetti. There are pink LEDs, it’s as if she’s taken to the water after a romantic breakup in a Rimini club. More prosaically, they’re shoes that Thomas ordered on the internet that were mistakenly the wrong size. In an exhibition nothing is lost and Thomas Liu Le Lann also makes art with Amazon prime insolence. Six-Feet-Under art that can be transported in less than 24 hours, the time to console oneself for one’s last love. Aesthetics of the graveyard, of tears and the freeport.
And then there are other paintings, or rather, given the dimensions, sculptures composed like puzzles. Young Faun Playing Flute is decorated with a poem. Cruising in the Luxembourg Gardens. Others are with floral compositions. These are his market darlings, the daffodils dance the Nutcracker like in Fantasia. Behind their apparent bonhomies à la Pierre Bonnard, they are in a position to attack. The army is still pink-washing. They will soon be alongside Martha Stewart or Bree Van de Kamp. The pleasure of giving. If the paintings are there to deco-rate, it’s in the spirit of more is never enough, à la Tony Duquette. No beige or grey here for the chaste individual, but vinyl that can be found on the benches of borderline prostitution bars.
For all his creations will end up in ashes. As Thomas has already said, he has no pretensions to posterity, and that is disarming. This bar of hoes may be opened by him in the future. As an honest conclusion, there are these three skateboards stacked like a bonfire: The Weakling. One thinks of Thomas Liu Le Lann in his teenage years skating in the streets of Nantes. We think of the bros and their looks at the one who thought he was Tony Hawk in Paloma Spain. He dreamt of being on Venice Beach and flirting while listening to electro-trash and reading Teren-ce Koh’s Asian Punk Boy blog. A puppet snake inherited from a National Geographic subscription smothers his three boards in a pop asphyxiation movement. Applause, applause. Milo is the title of his exhibition. The next show will be called Luka Magnotta or Catherine Tramell. He promised me.
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are a duo of curators and writers. They recently co-curated with Kevin Blindermann: Jacques de Bascher, an exhibition, presented as part of No Dandy No Fun at Kunsthalle Bern and at Treize, Paris. In collaboration with Rasmus Myrup and Octave Perrault, they initiated the Cruising Pavilion, a series of exhibitions dedicated to cruising and architecture which travelled to Venice (16th Architecture Biennale), New York (Ludlow 38) and Stockholm (ArkDes Museum). As an ongoing project, they also did a research residency at the LUMA Foundation in Arles initiated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and dedicated to Southern Gothic (arlesterminalcity.com). They have been editors of L’Officiel Art and are regular contributors to Spike, Mousse Magazine, Double, and Cura Magazine.