Didier Faustino: The Wild Things

The formal aspect of the works in Didier Faustino's first solo show at the Michel Rein gallery in Paris is impeccable. It is much more than a piece of his precise theoretical discourse linking different works and materials ranging from technology to crafts; it is the display of a kind of thinking that, on its own, can keep alive that 360° interest in the work of one of the most exciting and radical architects of the moment that has developed in the world of the visual arts. The energies deriving from performance or body art which changed conceptual artistic research, forcing it directly into the body of architecture, is reflected in his works, but never slavishly and never as a copy or cast. A process-oriented trend that, over time, has "contaminated" such giants as Vito Acconci or Chris Burden.

An echo of this work and experimentation is only a distant undertone in this "doing architecture with blood, hair, sweat and semen" which is also the "manifesto" phrase that has characterized the program of the Franco-Portuguese architect from the beginning of his art career. In the Paris show, we find, rather, tools and projects as well as some pieces summarizing his most recent ideas. Some constructions and typologies, while glimpsed in previous installations, bear witness to his persistence in claiming this discourse in absolute contiguity with architecture. This provides the public with not only a predefined principle of classification but also with a more general idea of moving through the world. Without a doubt, the work is to be read in a critical key in terms of what happens, rather, outside the spatial limit of the exhibition.

The title The Wild Things suggests that the energy behind these tools/projects (instrument for a blank architecture) testifies to an infinite operation of moving towards the realm of pure fiction. In the white gallery, the surveyor's tripods on which helmets are installed have abandoned their function, inviting the viewer to listen to frequencies that refer to mental landscapes—developed in cooperation with the Haswell office. Interacting with these instruments, we find ourselves interpreting an improbable performance defined, from a visual point of view, by objects of torture and, in any case, surrounded by a sort of sound perspective. As if to underline the development of narrative starting from minimal materials as a base for the work of making architecture is a project for a makeshift domestic shelter for one of the female characters in Virginie Despentes' next film; Bye Bye Blonde is first a drawing, subsequently reused as cryptic scheme for microarchitecture and eventually as a most elegant invitation to the exhibit.

A gorgeous video shot inside the abandoned Ministry of Highways in Tbilisi, maintains intact the freshness of the intuition of an old project—the Exploring Dead Buildings series. Here it is reassembled with drone vehicles serving to create videos starting from recovered materials found in the same building. Pure literature and a document of daily and contextual science fiction that takes place in a summary, standardized and ephemeral architecture with its empty monumentality. To disseminate the definition of wild things, again, a model of mathematical reproduction developed by expert bamboo craftsmen with chestnut branches and a base with a hidden pavilion. The marble object refers to statues and reproduces—without literally becoming it—the maquette for three founding architectural themes: ornament and relics seem to materialize the trust-no-architects spirit that inhabits the place.
Ivo Bonacorsi

Didier Faustino
The Wild Things
Galerie Michel Rein
until 14 May 2011
42 rue de Turenne, Paris