Frenzy   Metropole Galleries Folkestone

Even the highly cultivated allergy to kitsch, ornament, the superfluous, and anything reminiscent of luxury has an aspect of barbarism(1)

Frenzy- L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui is an exhibition that explores the often fraught relationship between ornamentation and contemporary art practice. 
The exhibition has been conceived as a response to the Edwardian Rococo interior of the Metropole gallery: a confection of Empire pomp and circumstance, contained beneath a layer of regulation Art Gallery whitewash, the result somewhere between Regency stucco and ‘dynamic’ 21st century modernity. 
Against this backdrop, Frenzy- L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui seeks to present a no less than engaged critique of Art’s function, through an exploration of decoration’s superfluous extravagance, it’s corrosively pretentious articulation of hierarchy and through ornament’s much vaunted criminal(2) ‘otherness’.
 The  participating artists have been invited to consider the role of decoration  within their work and to encounter the luxurious context of the gallery.  Frenzy will flirt with the unnecessary, excessive and distracting diversions of Folkestone’s Metropole.

The tasks of our century, so strenuous, so full of danger, so violent, so victorious, seem to demand of us that we think against a background of white… Once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself. And you will want to be precise, to be accurate, to think clearly… (3)

1.Theodor W. Adorno Aesthetic Theory translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor p61
2.Adolf Loos ‘Ornament and Crime’
First published in French in Les Cahiers d’Aujourd’hui in June 1913, from a talk given in Vienna in 1910, and was reprinted in L’Espirit nouveau, 1920
3.Le Lait de Chaux: La Loi Du Ripolin (A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of  Ripolin) Le Corbusier The Decorative Art of Today, translated by James  I. Dunnett (London: The Architectural Press, 1987) pxxvi. First published  as L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Editions Crés,  1925)

Exhibition organized by Alex Schady Five Years Gallery

Frenzy- L’Art decorative d’aujourd’hui 29 July – 1 September 2006 Metropole Galleries Folkestone

Guy Beckett, Charlotte Bonham- Carter, Michael Curran, Fiona Curran, Michelle Deignan, Edward Dorrian, Rochelle Fry, Matthew Hale, Denise Hawrysio, Marc Hulson, Hadas Kedar, Serena Korda, Peter Lamb, Cedar Lewisohn, Sally Morfill, Susan Morris, Esther Planas, Alex Shady, Mark R Taylor, Mary Maclean, Louisa Minkin, Yve Lomox, Michael Watson