Victoria Colmegna

Palace of Justice Camping, 2022

Oil on printed canvas

102 x 164 x 2 cm

Courtesy: Weiss Falk and the Artist

Photo: Gina Folly

In her idea of fashion, each statement corresponds to an organ and a garment. (There is a connection between organs and latitudes, as in Chinese medicine.) Marshall McLuhan could have been a medical alchemist as well: healing is unblocking a path, he would have said. The healthy state is like driving on a drizzly road, listening to the radio: pain moves freely, but alleviated. Hot states of attention are like a river that overflows, covering what is nearby. Meridians got estrangulated. The mind is captured by attentional relief. I feel the drug going up, Lee Lozano nearly said about her investigations into drug use. But if my work is to get high, what hits me is my work.

Colmegna picks photos of the Manson women, then she looks for the specific fabrics they happened to wear. If she finds the right fabrics, she applies them in the painting. The rest (clothes she can‘t find) she paints them. Post Picabian obsession meets pop political. True crime genre paintings, mass produced 90s memories. But in the method of these paintings there is also a dilemma: Are artists allowed to tell stories and impose trends the way journalists and film directors do?...

Victoria Colmegna

Size 9 Petit Court Room, 2022

Oil on printed canvas

125 x 164 x 4 cm

Courtesy: Weiss Falk and the Artist

Photo: Gina Folly

Love needs care was the slogan of a clinical investigation conducted by Dr David E Smith. (“I’d spend the day in the lab, injecting white rats with LSD, mescaline, and amphetamines,” recalls Smith. “Then I’d walk home through the Haight and see kids who were taking those same drugs.” He was the founder of Height Ashbury Clinic, a free hospital for hippies with bad trips, founded in 1967.) “Organs are also lines of advance,” said Deleuze and Guattari a few years later. Victoria Colmegna‘s interest in health and wellness institutions dates back a long time.

This wannabe anthological show is completed by a hedonist set of portraits of the coast of Uruguay inspired by Picabian paintings dispersed in the brothels of occupied North Africa. The theme of it girls reappears in AutreChienne and Decadance, derived from fan fiction art of the court of Marie Antoinette.