We recently came across some press for Jean Charles de Castelbajac’s, “Triumph of the Sign” exhibition currently running in London’s Paradise Row gallery.
Ok, so we thought we got it. We work in advertising. We use the word “brand” at least 5 times a day, but this exhibition blew our minds.
Why do we continue to underestimate the manipulative power of symbols? Magritte taught us early theories on semiotics – the power of words and their symbolic associations – with his painting “The Treachery of Images.” Nearly 80 years later, we are still fascinated with just how powerful a symbol like…a brand logo…can be. And power is scary. By applying them directly over western masterpiece like Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe pictured above, Castelbajac comments on the decline of culture, taste and individualism…
Official excerpt from the London show:
In Triumph of the Sign, Jean Charles de Castelbajac presents a series of paintings that articulate his fascination with, broadly, the tensions and synergies between high art and consumer culture, and most specifically that defining element of contemporary visual culture – the brand logo. In a process that mirrors the production of mass-consumer goods, Castelbajac commissioned painters in China to perfectly reproduce a series of Western masterpieces, from Bronzino to Manet, and another group to paint logos on the surfaces of the copied masterpieces. The resulting works ironically embrace a flattening of hierarchies, a breakdown of distinctions and an evacuation of content.
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