Heroe

Most objects don’t make it. With time and neglect, most objects become used up and worn down. It happens to cars and to desks and to books and to clothes. It happens to nails and to bolts. It happens to buildings and to bridges. It happens to lungs and to teeth and to bones and to hearts. They fall short. They disappear.

One could (and some do) develop a type of attachment to objects. A certain sentimentality. A touch of pity, perhaps, but also a sense of tenderness, compassion, and even romance. Holding onto something destined to be lost is somewhat heart breaking.

Camille Blatrix’s objects are bittersweet—they are impeccably fabricated but fraught with emotional entanglement. The surfaces are scrutinized, the edges are caressed, each detail is perfected, and yet the metaphors remain abstract and the origin stories never clear. They seem to be the work of a lover, a dreamer, a carpenter, and an engineer all rolled into one.

Imagine a piece of cold industrial machinery waking up with one foot on the wrong side of the bed. It’s tired but agitated. Its corners have curled up, like an animal showing its teeth or its feathers. It feels distraught but not timid—resolved to finding a way to overcome whatever is spoiling its mood. Its fate, however, remains far from secure.

Blatrix exchanges one type of abstraction for another: unstable emotional states become hand-sculpted wooden, plastic, or aluminum forms. His use of abstraction leads objects astray, and specific references become ambivalent ones.

For example, if a phone call once ended a relationship with a lover, the artist might use a telephone as a starting point to fabricate a series of amorphous curved shapes. Abstraction, in that sense, is a place objects go to disappear.