MONSIEUR DELMOTTE - FLYING CHICKENS

In 1998, Monsieur Delmotte gave a video-sequence the generic title Flying Chickens. This title was reprised for a video-installation at argos ("Rather a pretext for contextualizing than for conceptualising this work into the framework of an exhibition", according to Monsieur Delmotte). At argos, Flying Chickens consisted of 15 monitors but it could have been just as well an installation of 152: the screens were just set-up for showing a certain obsession – or better, a ceaseless fixation. The exhibition showed a fragment of a derisory undertaking.

Coarse and crude, Monsieur Delmotte’s videos make a mockery of just about everything. His actions are so banally urgent that they have to take place, here and now. In the exhibition Flying Chickens he posed as a fan of the fall. Many artists have been inspired by the air, the fall or in the jump in the creation of their individual myth. The dandyish Monsieur Delmotte falled too – falling into the pond after setting his arse on fire or the fall of the artist sawing the legs off the chair on which he was sitting. But it went on, for he falled more than his fair share: plunging in pirouettes and, above all, falling philosophically. Tumbling, sliding, tripping, somersaulting and jumping into the void.

Monsieur Delmotte – currently working as Messieurs Delmotte – devotes himself to the substitution ‘re-creation’, like the numerous prosaic images which he has already transfigured. His works are not self-portraits and even less transpositions of the designer in one or several fictitious character(s). They can merely be subscribed as dissolved identities of an artist, a sort of rejections, absences of subject. When we envisage overall a video installation, a Tea Dance or any other of Monsieur Delmotte’s acts, we are already taking part willy-nilly. The spirit goes ahead of the body, establishing connections, bringing together indices even before we were able to closely examine the exhibit. Between reality and fiction, the one is possibly in the other; perhaps it is one and the same thing that is exploding into a multitude of fragments, which disperse until they disappear. It is an extremely fine line between the prompted scenario and the real sequence of an act. What would happen if you were to go into your neighbours’ house without their authorisation, in order to kiss them on the mouth, and ended up by really doing it? As Monsieur Delmotte states: "Je le fais, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais je le fais!"