Celebrated like stars in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, the American artist duo Faile has been invited to exhibit in major museums such as the Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, or more recently the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg. Three years after their last exhibition in Paris, the gallery is proud and delighted to welcome FAILE again to present their latest works to the public.
Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, who make up the famous duo, find inspiration in the visual world of their youth. A world permeated by comics from the 80s, Hollywood movies, Spaghetti Westerns, children's stories. Permeated as well by commercial imagery and strewn with references to the recent American history.
In this vast iconography, the two artists cut out fragments, fiddle with them, transform them, combine them in countless different ways. An approach that recalls the art of collage: the art of bringing up unstable compositions, mashed up stories, semantic collisions. Faile is known for its striking aesthetic beaming with energy and immediately recognizable. Multitalented artists, the two work with the same ease across a wide range of media: painting on canvas, screen printing, stenciling, posters, sculpture, as well as monumental murals.
In this exhibition, Faile explores new graphic possibilities, introduces new themes, plays with cultural text borrowed from Disney and with elements taken from their personal lives, such as vinyls and books. We find in these new works something of a return to the roots, with references to graffiti as well as to a previous stay in Paris: the poster of a Birdy Nam Nam concert at the Olympia, a forgotten bicycle, the emblematic white tiling on the Paris subway, etc.
In three years - since their last exhibition in Paris - Faile has pursued and deepened its narrative experiments. Here the two artists are having fun letting their creative juices splash out of the frame, transforming the walls of the gallery by covering them with wild, large, ureal landscapes, giving the space a false air of the great American West. But a West contaminated or infiltrated by urban references, lettering or drawings straight out of comic books. Hanging their works on these backgrounds teeming with their signature patterns, the artists create a compelling dialogue between foreground and background, between form and content… As in a mirror game, this mise en abyme is endlessly refracted and the eye is constantly leaping from the paintings to the walls, from one reference to another, feeding on the wealth of the artists' creations.
Faile stirs the waters and pioneers new modes of visual expression that are sure to surprise and seduce with their originality.
