Liên Hoàng Xuân & Kévin-Ademola Sangosanya “Last peep show before summer”

The title of the exhibition by Liên Hoàng Xuân and Kévin-Ademola Sangosanya, like a cabaret sign, entices everyone to offer whoever dares to enter “last peep show before summer”. Between the burlesque and the tragic, the eroticism that will be found within these walls nevertheless goes against everything one might have imagined.

It is in the baring of their hearts, the depths of their souls and the tumults of their beings, their hopes and secrets, their anxieties and regrets, that the two artists apply themselves to these walls. Material of their words and images, it is in their intertwining that everything is unveiled. In the haikus and golden words of Liên Hoàng Xuân; in the fluorescent green and gothic letters of Kévin-Ademola Sangosanya. In the angels with wide wings of the former, her impossible cities, her untraceable landscapes; in the forked hands of the monsters of the latter, under the foliage of his sacred trees, in his irregular and infinite checkerboards.

Words and images float, commented on by each other, dissociated from one another, assembled, diverted. They seek an order to follow, stumbling. They create a gap through which to glimpse the reality of the two artists, what their practice is based on, what she and he find meaning, pleasure, and displeasure in.

What is the rest of the two artists deliver to us, precisely? What do their frantic inscriptions and mysterious figures say about her and him? Their all-over of intimate journals and sketchbooks patiently pasted on the walls of the gallery?

There seems to be little in common in the ways of Liên Hoàng Xuân and Kévin-Ademola Sangosanya, except for an urgency to share what stirs them from within, to question the norms, social and political, that seek to control them from the outside, to invoke the intimate as a source of resilience and to find a companion to face the trials. To prevent dizziness, despair, or depression, to regain a sense, a direction, and to stick to it, the two artists adorn themselves with benevolent angels and demons, protective monsters and totemic animals, sacred leaves taken from a distant forest. These figures are sometimes called “apotropaic”. They ward off evil and accompany the being who is willing to receive them, who takes the risk of invoking them. It is with them that the two artists will spend the summer after their final strip.

Text written by Horya Makhlouf