Antoine Catala

Feelings are our business. Little or big.

One definition of art that still sticks is that it’s “thinking with emotions”. Yet we hardly talk about emotions when it comes to art. Goods circulating also communicate emotions, for they may attract your attention. Places (restaurants, sports arenas, concert venues, airports) each carry a distinct emotional signature.

I am interested in the moment when feelings that emanate from a public environment become internalized, and when private emotions (at the individual level) become public. I want to sit on this fence, between public and private.

Sliding a letter into an envelope, licking the sour glue, slowly unwrapping a packaging—these actions participate in that transition. To talk about feelings has this strange effect to either mutate them or make them vanish. Language disintegrates feelings. Or should I say daisy-enter-grates?

This show is about the traces and intentions readable in the everyday things we encounter in our lives. It’s about how language structures thoughts and how thoughts grapple with emotions.

Antoine Catala (b. 1975 Toulouse, FR; lives and works in New York City) has been included in a number of museum and prestigious exhibitions worldwide, including most recently the 58th Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff (2019); Kunsthalle Mainz (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2018); Les Abattoirs Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Toulouse (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2016); Whitney Museum, New York (2015); and the New Museum Triennial, New York (2015) amongst others. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Nam June Paik award at the Westfälischer Kunsteverin, Münster.