The notorious nudes and pages of The Guardian? Claire Fontaine’s dazzling show got a lot going for it! | art

TClaire Fontaine’s works are full of rich and complex objects and images whose state and meaning are constantly changing. There are jokes. There is handwritten watercolor text, copied over and over again, freeing the writer from the oppression of his predecessors (the book concludes with I am free). There’s a raucous take on Marcel Duchamp’s moustachioed, arched Mona Lisa, his salacious but baffling 1919 LHOOQ caption replaced with LGBTQ+. There are book covers about the devastated Palestinian environment and visual activism in post-October 7 Palestine, each wrapped around blocks of stone, like letters that would be sent through someone’s window.

At the 2024 Venice Biennale, Claire Fontaine’s neon signs reading “Foreigners Everywhere,” written in dozens of languages, appeared and reappeared around the Giardini and the Arsenal, and also gave the Biennale its overall title, transforming an unexpectedly familiar complaint into a celebration of difference. A new neon sign reading “FATHERFUCKER”, hanging and glowing behind the window of Mimosa House, is opening its largest exhibition in London to date.

Someone walks by and catches the word in his peripheral vision. They took a few steps back, then looked back again. Others sit at the window and take selfies. Someone else has already reported to the council to lodge a complaint. “Maybe the word motherfucker comes from a place of complete lack of empathy. We’ve gotten to a point where we don’t have any anymore,” Fulvia Carnevale told me, as she and James Thornhill, known together as Claire Fontaine, were finishing an installation of their show, called Show Less, at the gallery. The damned father reflects the insult. “These works are all about injustice,” Carnevale adds. “The show is about structural injustice and how we deal with it. You know, patriarchy is an injustice, but it’s an injustice to men, too.”

Claire Fontaine calls herself a “ready-made artist”, borrowing her name from the famous French stationery brand. Claire Fontaine also means transparent fountain, which can also be taken as a reference to Duchamp’s 1917 fountain, a ready-made urinal. Not all of their references are very clear. The gallery’s floors and stairs are completely covered with newspapers – strips from recent editions of The Guardian – donated by staff. This is a distant reference to a set of photographs taken by Robert Capa in 1949, showing Henri Matisse working on his designs for the chapel he was designing in Vence, outside Nice. Matisse had covered the floor of a makeshift studio with newspapers to protect the tiles beneath. Here, it’s a newsroom, a continuous backdrop of yesterday’s news, swirling beneath our feet.

Currently, Thornhill and his assistant are installing a large, backlit Venn diagram on the wall, three intersecting circles in blue, peach and yellow, the circles indicating witnesses, perpetrators and victims. Titled “Intersections,” Claire Fontaine sourced the diagram from the Internet. It casts a flush of color on the newspapers beneath it. “It’s not about who’s innocent, who’s guilty, who’s the victim — it’s about how we deal with violence in our daily lives that destroys all the dignity, basically, of art, of doing symbolic work,” says Carnevale.

Two other light boxes, their dimensions inspired by those of a mobile phone but greatly enlarged, like airport advertisements, hang nearby. One contains an enlarged image of a drawing that was smuggled from a Yemeni prison and posted online in 2018. Untitled (They Sexually Harass, Torture, Then Film and Publish) is an unfortunate scrap of packing foam in which one prisoner has urgently detailed his experience. The light boxes were covered with a second image of a broken phone screen, and the cracks became embedded in the image underneath.

“This photo is completely anonymous,” Thornhill says. “It is a description of the torture that the prisoners were subjected to.” Carnevale refers to small, rough drawings. “This is someone getting ready to rape, and these two guards are filmed beating this headless man. It’s an incredibly brutal image of total darkness and the Arabic subtitles are a description of what you’re seeing. The fact that we’re seeing through a broken screen in some ways reflects the fact that we don’t understand.” One part of the image has been monitored from the source. We don’t know what was blocked. What you don’t see here is probably the scariest thing about it.

Multiple life-size versions of Gustave Courbet’s infamous 1866 oil painting L’Origine du Monde line up in one gallery: close-up and spread-after-view of a woman’s pubis and vulva. Her breasts are partially wrapped in a sheet. Having passed between many collectors, from an Ottoman diplomat who collected erotic works to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Courbet’s painting is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. All the reproductions were hand-painted in China, commissioned by Claire Fontaine, and each is a completely different reproduction.

Previously, they had been working on postcards, including Modigliani’s, Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” and “Olympia”, each of which are iconic paintings of nude women also staring at you. “We subverted them in a kind of feminist key,” says Carnevale. “We commissioned 12 copies made by Courbet. Everything was done by hand, without resorting to copying over projections of the original. The slight changes in position, hair, sex, vagina and color were all different. When they arrived at our studio in Palermo it felt like a pile-up of bodies. It started to feel like a rape scene. So we worked on it a little differently, less brutal, than it had been in the postcard copy “Our own.”

Sometimes, spray paint leaves a haze, bruise, redness, or gangrenous pallor. The spray is terribly intimate. “You’re always kind of nervous about making the first mark,” Thornhill says, “but once you get into it, it resolves itself. Drawing is kind of a magical process.”

Is there a difference between drawing and vandalism? “People who vandalize works in the museum are committing an extreme act of desperation and paying for prison and everything, but we add value to these copies,” Thornhill says. “Somehow, the images are put in a state of extreme ambiguity, as to the original.” However, Courbet’s painting remains the subject of much academic controversy. The postcard bearing Courbet’s painting is the second most popular card in the Musée d’Orsay gift shop, after Renoir.

We start looking down, scanning the floor, and picking up the headlines. What you have to watch out for is people who spend all their time here looking at the newspaper instead of doing other work. You seem to have a sort of ever-expanding repertoire of works that you use and reuse and repackage, I would say. Your work is about reshaping.

“The movement of foreigners has expanded everywhere in a way we never imagined,” says Carnevale. “Our work is co-opted and appropriated. Not having to worry about being original frees you up. It gives you a full range of material available to work with.”

At one point, Carnevale quotes some lines from Bertolt Brecht, written in 1939:

In dark times
Will there be singing too?
Yes, there will be singing too
About dark times.

“It’s very much our time,” she says. “But now when you write songs about dark times, they say you’re a traitor and a monster. At many moments, contemporary art was a comfort for us in terms of being in a space where we were allowed to live and exist and do things that weren’t understood or valued anywhere else. Now, it feels like a space of privilege. And that’s bad for everyone. I think it’s about conforming to your present, and trying to maintain a dignified status. People can They can say what they want, but I’m pretty sure everyone needs to believe that something is not bullshit.