The languorous, dreamy gaze of Oscar Wilde greets the visitors to the Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin, which presents an exhibition of works of French artists Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille.The portrait of the Irish novelist and critic, titled simply ‘Oscar Wilde’ (oil on wood, 2015), is a painterly reproduction of a photograph by Napoleon Sarony, taken around 1882. In the series of works displayed at the show the two artists pay homage to the decadent aesthetics of Wilde as well as explore the writer’s belief that ‘[a]rt never expresses anything but itself,’ articulated in an essay The Decay of Lying (1891).Tursic and Mille’s art makes a point of exposing the artificiality of the medium of paint, for example in the series ‘OFFSET’ (oil on offset mounted on dibond, 2015), which look more like a mixing palette rather than a finished work of art.The fact that the pair work on each painting simultaneously also brings the viewer’s attention to painting as an unfinished dialogue between two artistic personalities, rather than a completed, static image. In their figurative works, such as ‘Purple blossom’ (oil and silver on canvas, 2015), the duo overlaps pornographic images with layers of paint, questioning the separation between art and mass-produced imagery.The exhibition has an air of playfulness to it, as Tursic and Mille subtly undermine the assumption that art has to be a high-brow and serious form. The exhibition runs until October 2.
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