Tinsel, lilies, Bowie and Lenin: the lavish yet austere art of Marc Camille Chaimowicz

“Dear Zoe . . . Emma feels tired and longs to sleep yet wants to stay awake.” Scrawled on scraps of white paper adorned with Cocteauish sketches of a woman, the notes frame a collage of images torn from magazines including the fragment of a naked girl in a state of reverie, silky lingerie and what just might be a feather boa. If this weren’t decadence enough for the small A4 surface, a quartet of shiny foil chocolate wrappers is spreadeagled on top.

Welcome to the cryptic, enchanted world of Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Soaked in desire yet tapping out an SOS to the dangers of that sentiment (the “Emma” in that billet-doux is Madame Bovary), defiantly Old World pretty yet too precise in his cultural quotations to be anything but 21st-century-knowing, Chaimowicz is one of contemporary art’s most quixotic practitioners. 

If his name is less familiar than some of his peers, that’s because his cocktail of image, object, pattern, colour and light with a splash of art history is created far from the art-world hurdy-gurdy. Writing in the third person, Chaimowicz once described his home studio as somewhere he “could shelter from the external world”, gather “energy for his spirit and re-acquire . . . contact with his self”. Yet despite his taste for seclusion the Paris-born, London-based artist has shown widely across Europe since his career began in the 1970s, including a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2016.

If anything, his current show, Nuit américaine, at WIELS contemporary art centre in Brussels, showcases him even better than the London antecedent. The lofty spaces afforded by the former brewery act as a spartan counterpoint to Chaimowicz’s fluid, mixed-media sensibility. Comprising just three ambitious works, Nuit américaine echoes his gift for art that is at once lavish and austere. 

Chaimowicz was convinced that ‘questioning everything’ was the only way forward as a citizen and an artist

It opens with “Celebration Realife Revisited” (1972-2000). Imagine Studio 54 reconceptualised by Proust with footnotes by Marx and you get a sense of an installation that is at once discotheque, morning-after party, Communist HQ and Catholic church. The dim chamber is lit by roaming strobes and serpentines of fairy lights that weave through a floor strewn with party streamers, burning candles, curling lilies, tinsel, glitter balls, an image of Warhol’s Marilyn, another of Lenin, and a magazine spread of chasuble robes. It pulses to a soundtrack of Bowie, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones.

Although Chaimowicz updated “Celebration” in 2000, it is still a time capsule of pleasures past, at once hedonistic and reverent, carnivalesque and ascetic. It is a lily-scented confessional for souls that have seen too much yet also, as that snap of Lenin hints, a call to get a party started that just might be communist at heart. 

The seeds of “Celebration” were sown in 1968, when the Paris demonstrations, in which Chaimowicz participated, convinced him that “questioning everything” was the only way forward as a citizen and an artist. At a moment when so much painting was steeped in elitist values yet mainstream British conceptualism smelt of a chilly, monochrome rigour, Chaimowicz ploughed his own course. Harnessing pattern and colour, embracing media such as wallpaper and textile design eschewed by the fine art establishment as “decorative”, Chaimowicz forged a left-leaning practice that was also camp, erotic and seductive.

As work number two at WIELS demonstrates, if Chaimowicz is a secret Marxist then that ideology has never looked more bourgeois. Entitled “The Hayes Court Sitting Room” (1979-2023) it is, according to the institutional text, a “theatrical evocation” of the living space the artist inhabited in south London for four decades.

Unfolding across a triptych of wallscapes, it is an Art Deco-ish odyssey which flows through hand-printed wallpapers, fireplace and cushions, shuttered Venetian blinds, an Eileen Gray table, the spectral stencil of a religious cross removed years earlier, a tiny replica of Rodin’s “Kiss” and a retro drinks table laid with liqueur bottles. Yet this list fails to convey the less-is-more virtues of Chaimowicz’s respect for absence: the crucial part played by the space between objects and motifs; moments of silence in the most exuberant scores. 

The tension between flamboyance and rectitude culminates in the triumphant final work, “Dear Zoë” (2020-23). A suite of 40 collages, “Dear Zoë” doubles as rhapsodic picture postcards addressed to the show’s curator Zoë Gray. Riffing on Flaubert’s novel, itself a catechism against sex and shopping even as it tugs us into their irresistible mystique, and encompassing images cut out from luxury lifestyle magazines but also drawings, handwritten notes and objets trouvés, the work is a love letter to longing that is also a Dear John. Typical of the style is one that begins “Dear Zoë” then unravels into cut-outs of jewelled ballet slippers, dolphin brooches and phallic lipsticks which spiral through a mollusc of caramel paper laid on a mauve ground before signing off “Emma, Ever Desirous”. 

So impish are these diminutive ensembles, it’s hard to choose favourites. But hats off to Chaimowicz for the one that plays on mid-century French advertisements for cruises in the “Indochine”, with hand-coloured sketches of palm trees and donkeys ridden by turbaned gentlemen. In a culture sector desperately trying to decolonialise itself, “Dear Zoë” — which also reminds western audiences of our fetish for perfumes with names such as Jaipur and Opium — is a gentle but urgent reminder of how potent cheap colonial fantasies can be. 

Finally, it’s worth noting that Chaimowicz remains a defiantly analogue artist. Although “Dear Zoë” is a new work — and how nice to see an artist d’un certain age prove that he’s better than ever — its genius for critiquing gendered and racialised capitalism lies in his choice to look back in controlled, tender and complicit anger. The age, as evoked by Nuit américaine, looks innocent in comparison to our current era of hyper-globalised exploitation and consumerist hysteria.

Although there is no sequence to “Dear Zoe”, the finale is surely those collages of denuded rooms, their furniture slapped with reclamation and requisition notices. As Emma Bovary discovered, the line between have and have-not is sometimes very fine indeed. Be careful what you wish for, whispers Chaimowicz, even as he makes our yearning look so lovely. 

To August 13, wiels.org