Don’t: Camille Henrot Review – A Surreal Psychosexual Drama for the Digitally Weary | art

CEmile Henrot is accustomed to dealing with the vast and the unknown. She was asking the big questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? Why do we do what we do? Her 2014 show at Chisenhall in London was about the origins of humanity and Darwinism, and her film Gross Weariness is about the creation of the universe. But in her latest work, the French artist has moved towards the introspective, the quiet, the small and the mundane.

Here in this small private museum on the stables, the one-time winner of the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion has ditched the overly complex and ambitious chaos of her installations and films. Instead, she slimmed down, went minimalist and took a long, hard look at herself.

In the show, titled “Don’t,” there are two bodies of work: a series of layered paintings, and a group of drawings on paper. The paintings are frenetic, sketchy digital abstracts, and each one is a combination of screenshots, collage paper, and real human brushstrokes—part analogue experience and part Photoshop manipulation. There are pages taken from etiquette manuals copied and pasted over each other, little globs of paint obscuring words, and error messages from photo apps scribbled in angry pen marks.

Lose yourself trying to figure out what’s digital and what’s analog, what’s real and what’s going on on your laptop. The series is called “Do’s and Don’ts”, as if Henrot is trying to analyze what is and is not acceptable in society, and trying to understand the rules she is supposed to follow.

Paintings work best in person. There are photos of her husband and children collaged in one work, an x-ray of her wrist in another, while hidden behind digital doodles in the best painting is a screenshot of an invoice for egg storage (eggs saved for IVF treatment). These are not just explorations of societal rules and restrictions, but visual diaries, portraits, and inquiries into how to navigate the digital world when you’re overwhelmed and stressed. The post-internet digital aesthetic is great, but it’s this deeply personal exploration of the everyday and mundane that makes them more than just pretty digital paintings.

The drawings don’t need to be unpacked or explained: this is a world of mythical monsters and salacious sensuality. Hybrid creatures roam in simple line drawings, part pig, part man, part donkey, part woman. Testicles have human faces, crazy foxes lick semen, and women have penises. It’s a surreal psychosexual drama, a vision of private desires emerging from the page. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know that this entire show is an extraordinary window into Henrot’s daily life, and you can’t get an accurate picture of everyday life without including some very salacious moments of complete physical abandonment.

Although these works are not as good as Henrot’s installations and films, they serve a purpose. They ask: What’s left after you get rid of the big gestures and the big questions? For Henrot, it is the temporary, the strange, the loving, the exciting, the boring, the mundane of everyday life – the things of life at their simplest.