Exo Exo, Paris – Independent Brussels 2018, Isaac Lythgoe

Independent Brussels
Isaac Lythgoe

Vanderborght building
November 8 - 11, 2018

Isaac Lythgoe at Independent Brussels, 2018

Isaac Lythgoe, Big boi, 2018
Polyurethane, pigments, wood, paint, perspex, fabric, hardware, Adidas tracksuit
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Isaac Lythgoe, Come closer, 2018
Aluminium, hardware, perspex, polyurethane, stainless steel, Gucci scarf
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Isaac Lythgoe, Never land, 2018
Polyurethane, urethane, wood, 3d print, stainless steel, Dolce Gabbana jacket
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Isaac Lythgoe, Never land, 2018
Polyurethane, urethane, wood, 3d print, stainless steel, Dolce Gabbana jacket
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Cities of angels, cities of filth and fineries, cities drugged awake and silent, consciousness never asleep. The booth is a step into a clearing, maybe its Waterloo Bridge still at 4am, maybe its an Alice esque monopoly board. London landmarks are mounted on the wall, scaled models that appear uprooted from the ground, plucked from the street, their attachments to the city’s infrastructure left trailing from the bottom, like uprooted trees. These high rise buildings have become both houses and bodies of sorts, forms grafted onto figures architecture eating bodies. They are characters with narra- tive threats, watchers in the bigger story. Pinocchio, posed, peers down his long nose, following it out of Big Ben’s clock face, his hooves kicked through the sandstone tower, eight fingers holding on for fright.

Michael died on my birthday. A strange start to our trip, hushed disbelief, and eyes everywhere glancing TVs. My real attraction came with his evasive- ness. The more I returned and tried to position him, the more he slipped. I began thinking of him as if he’d shifted out of a typically linear history; the radical physical changes, the evolution of a singular style of movement - which never seemed to diminish, the fairytale house. Often I think of Peter Pan, the impossibilities allowed in dreams at night, the eternalisation of childhood wonderment, that, as adults we very rarely glimpse. I feel like Michael was pushing for eternal youth, for an elixir, innocence, and its his shedding of personas, and the alterations that took him to a state of unreality.

The Dangerous album cover, Michael might be looking at you or off left back in time. Michael’s gaze is constant, his eyes a constant. I wanted to get something of his enigma into a work, but retain something definite of him. I moved to sleep and dreams, but the eyes remained. The headboard as an object is a strange layer, a plain adjacent to sleep. It is effacing, over-looking and suggestive. I began to think of Michael in both the first and third person. That is to say with the works you might choose to hold his gaze or, slip, imagine yourself laid out in the bed in front, eyesight altered, lightly drifting off toward Neverland.

- Isaac Lythgoe

Isaac Lythgoe (born 1989, UK) focuses on the fictional context wherein the work takes shape. The presence of the characters, a time frame, and a location are required for his installations composed of sculptures, neon, fabric, furniture, and other objects to find their meaning. Alongside the narrative imagined by the artist, dreams and the subconscious create temporal and fictional distortions. In this narrative flux, characters borrowed from mythology and pop culture flirt with power, to find themselves trapped as historical landmarks, curled up in a fancy hotel or sitting on top of a CBD skyscraper in a search for eternal youth.

Isaac Lythgoe graduated from the Royal College of Art. His work is currently exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in the show « Michael Jackson, on the wall » and at the gallery Fran Reus at Palma de Majorque.