Jacques Louis Vidal: In The Project Room: Underground Posterz

In the Project Room:

Jacques Louis Vidal Underground Posterz

April 25 - May 25

Broadway is pleased to announce Underground Posterz a solo exhibition by New York artist Jacques Louis Vidal.

Envisioned as both a totalizing environment and a conglomeration of discrete artworks, the show transforms the Project Room into a distorted retail environment. Evoking a late-20th Century point of purchase for adolescent tribal signifiers, Underground Posterz sets the stage for strange matters of a more timely nature. In this sense, Vidal envisions the overly mediated, and hazy experience of a subcultural (and subterranean) shop as a “disguised portal to another universe”.

Vidal’s individual works on paper, which assume the role of the titular posters, are created by feeding his own drawings into an AI image generator. Situated somewhere between Art Nouveau and horror, they are adorned with hand-applied ink, pencil and pigment, as well as curious laser-cut wood components. The result is a richly patterned, densely drafted, and hard- to-source universe that is both utterly familiar and hair-raisingly distant.

More broadly, Vidal’s use of these overlapping patterns evokes the hyper-detailed tradition of guilloché (historically used in paper currency, watchmaking, and etchings as a mark of fidelity, and a strategy to hinder counterfeiting). As the artist puts it, this is to signal “Trust me, a highly skilled person made these.” The irony here, of course, lies with Vidal’s compression of the images via successive layers of machine intervention.

A latticed, wooden shaft makes up the central form of the installation, creating a layered moiré as we view the wall works through its slotted screens. The enclosure itself houses an odd collection of objects including animatronic wooden animals (impatiently tapping their toes and checking the time), collaged crystal fragments arranged in a hand-spun wire mesh display, and the proto-email technology embodied in a pneumatic tube capsule. All of this, in turn, is framed by three handcrafted/3-D printed columns (mimicking an existing fourth) and a Cineplex carpet with a pattern that recalls particle acceleration. The artist has created a space that would appear to be replicating itself and obliterating whatever temporal sense we may have left.