Introduction à l'O-isme
Patrick Javault is welcoming Jim Shaw.
If the expression « to build an oeuvre » still applies to some artists, Jim Shaw certainly is one of them. Not only does he produce an impressive number of works in series, but he first has to imagine the narrative medium on which to found them. After writing down his dreams for over ten years to turn them into material for drawings, paintings, or objects, after telling the story of Billy (« My Mirage »), Jim Shaw designed his most ambitious project in the early twenty-first century: the creation of a religion, O-ism, on the model of Mormonism and new religions that accompanied the birth of the United States. Within this counterfeit religion, its founding myths, its rites, its figures, the artist proposes a reading of pictorial modernity as well as American society, from the Westbound trails to the Tea Parties. In this world, in which his dreams and centers of interest also have a part (notably with the production of « thrift paintings » comparable to the ones he long collected and exhibited), the imaginary figure of Adam O. Goodman holds a particular place. This painter, who authored a serious oeuvre of abstract, geometric paintings tinged with spirituality, is also the author (under the pseudonym Archie Gunn) of paintings for posters of O-ist films. Jim Shaw’s enterprise has to do with history, politics, and anthropology, revealing a treasure-trove of imagination and a prodigious freedom. Presenting a picture of the United States and the American unconscious, it reveals the cult of art and the way in which revelation, prophesy, genius, and success, but also dogmas and taboos, intersect in it. Rarely has the insertion of fiction into reality been carried out so far, rarely have so many different voices been heard within a work still belonging in the visual arts, and rarely has such a narrative progression been conceived, exhibition after exhibition, in what is akin to a cycle. After « Left Behind, » a brilliant exhibition presented at the Capc in 2010, Jim Shaw is back in France for a new, O-ism-inspired, exhibition at the Praz-Delavallade gallery. In the company of philosopher and critic Jean-Philippe Antoine, the artist and some of his doubles will speak.
