“Banana Riders”, 2004.

Its use, which goes beyond the incongruity and gruesomeness of a first reading (the one for a giggle), marks a syntactic necessity that he identifies in the organization of his artistic language; a marker, like a preposition, indicating that the intervention of a mechanical function is at work, both at the level of body movements and those of thought. For this reason, he places them at the feet of his first Production Machines. As he gradually became more comfortable using this lexicon, he introduced it into the conception of works more openly articulated around these mechanistic notions: Mental Projection (mechanization of image production through suicide), The Rink (choreography of the fall), or for the installation in question here: Banana Riders. The horde of riders, perched on bananas, is arranged as if to breach enemy lines. They carry conquering banners inscribed with the chemical formulas of the most common wetting agents. Here, the device takes a more political turn, returning to one of the artist’s real obsessions, an existential terror he identified in one of his interviews as the aesthetics of generalized rape, applied to the commodification of the world (*). Another work, Banana Head (traumatic insemination), echoes this massive rape.

“Glissades”: Instability, indistinction and humorous postures in the so-called postmodern era. Charlotte Serrus. PUP. 2012

(*) Interview with J.Y. Jouannais in “Avant toute Chose”… (2004, Éditions jpr Ringier).