Toxic Wasn't Just a Song: Grégory Sugnaux

Opening 28th March 2025, 6-10 pm

Britney painting melancholia

(BPM)

Teenage Angst and cursed Images are two terms that were also haunting like ghosts and now claim their role and position in current art production. They are part of it, like the unloved aunt you'd rather not talk to about the current geopolitical climate. Ghosts are often uninvited guests, but what if these guests become part of the inventory, so integrated that they are now not only a gesture but also a consensus. A Ghost randomly appears, like an „earworm“ (Ohrwurm, a German word for a song that is stuck in your head), that pops up in your head. This time it’s the song vanished by Crystal Castles, Grégory and I talked about, while pinning down inspirational background of his work for the show „Toxic Wasn’t Just a Song“. Or like Kids by Mgmt, which was released online at the same time around 2006, when we both were teenagers, and partly lived in the internet. Our playground. Hymns remain hymns, but what if hymns are not used as marching music but as a lube for nostalgia?

We now know what cursed images are. But what are un-cursed images? Holy images? Icons?

The concept of the icon lacks meaning, because it was twisted until it was spat out of the vortex of the data stream, surreal and soiled. Did you ever spit on the floor? Has youthful recklessness ever made you spit on the floor???Because saliva too is a form of claiming ownership. Can we own these images? Can we own anything at all nowadays? Owning data? Owning subjects that were totally not born in our heads? The cloud is a meterological phenomenon, but now a form of storage too? Now I’m thinking about Turner’s clouds, thinking about clouds in paintings. Paintings.

The supposed security that rituals (including the working process, in this case painting) offer us is also just a desire for an anchor. To immortalize oneself. And that is what replaces teenage angst, the desire to imprint oneself rather than the desire to deny oneself.

The subjects of the show seem anti, the execution is hard to beat in terms of romantic digital loveliness and affinity for painting. Sugnaux manages to maintain the balancing act between uncanny internet aesthetics and the mild observational anchoring of impressionism.

Eyes lit on sharp threats from dark lips

The lights press the soft skin to rough hands

Eyes lit on sharp threats from dark lips

The lights press the soft skin to rough hands

Another painting shows Eminem's kiss with a fan, a transgressive iconic moment (icon painting also tends to be sexual transgression, or transgression of female destiny). Just like the band Crystal Castles didn't survive a wave of cancel culture because the singer abused  his former partner and bandmate Alice Glass.

The images as signs of the times integrate the ambivalence, the dilemma, the beautiful in the ugly. Personal and collective suffering, a modern form of history painting.

The tragedy in the everyday, THE tragedy in the visual language of the 2000s. 9/11, which marks a new time in which we find ourselves, the last 20 years, in which we understand what we are heading towards, but also have no way of avoiding it. We inevitably see what is coming towards us on the internet, it is a snow globe. That is why it is also a bittersweet gesture to collect the subjects from the internet. In German you used to say people „saugen“ (“suck”) music off the Internet, pre spotify times. Suckers.

But this is about painting really, the medium that, despite its ancient undertones doesn’t seem to die. So may I put it like that: why are we suckers for painting?

The colors of Sugnaux’s paintings are like a seductive melody, the spikes like a mild staccato that makes our pupils dance to the rhythm. The break in the painterly surface is like a song that dissolves the static of the painting.

Untrust us.

Untrust your eyes, because in the future you won't be able to believe it. Although as a teenager you were constantly told to keep your interest in your environment alive. If you were lucky.

Untrust us, an invitation to evade the principle of trust. An invitation that also fluctuates in the world of images on the internet. Images can no longer be trusted, images are no longer proofs of current events due to their inherent potential for manipulation. Painting on the other hand has always had this power to curate the truth, to end it and to use it for its own cause.

The eye looks furtively through a crack- is it really important whether the eye existed like that, the monster, is it not essentially about the symbolism?

In psychoanalysis, it is fundamental to observe that the interpretation of the symbols changes over a certain period of time. Perhaps it is not a monster per se, perhaps it is the inner disgust that confronts you with unpleasant things that you would like to forget. Perhaps it is also a self-portrait, a miserable confession of one's own inadequacy. To the once great strength and anger that you felt as a teenager, which have now crept into adulthood as comfort and the now-trending Biedermeier have been internalized. Sometimes you still listen to Crystal Castles and wish you were standing in the grind, in the rain, your current adolescent situation getting worse and worse, because the hypothetical tomorrow will be better, everything will be great as soon as you're allowed to be your own person.

And now, in these times, grown up finally, we are confronted with the fact that the drought has become a must, and the human being has become a capitalized consumption machine of the internet.

Yes, please don't trust us anymore, criticize us, close your eyes.

Open them again, look at paintings, get carried away into impressionistic gardens, which potentially unite peace and hope in their analog cyclic closed-loop.

Sophie Gogl