Adelaide \ Maria Bilske on Mathieu Gallois.

Mathieu Gallois Experimental Art Foundation

Adelaide, Australia

by Maria Bilske

Mathieu Gallois' installations and performances are characterized by a certain theatricality. Whether erecting a life-size polystyrene facsimile of a kit home in a new housing estate in Sydney's suburbs (Frontier, 1998) or photographing every passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight (Flight 934-B, 2000), Gallois fabricates a sensationalized reality that is at once seductive and disquieting.

A similar sensibility informs Flesh, Gallois' new work at the Experimental Art Foundation. Set on a curving stage, the installation mimics a film set. A plushly cushioned, canopied bed forms the centrepiece, with a pair of palm trees and a false pond surrounded by sand completing the scene -- which Gallois has painted entirely in blue. It's the archetypal Hollywood version of a desert oasis, the hallucinatory image that appears to the hero in his desert-heat-induced delirium.

The slick theatricality leaves the viewer to question the substance of this reified mirage. The tableau is ostensibly real enough, despite the curvature of the stage, which erases the horizon, leaving the scene floating and placeless. Still, the lighting is too dim to trust our eyes absolutely and the parameters of the platform prevent us from getting close enough to touch any part of the scene and verify its tangibility. There's the matter of its blueness too, which itself is suggestive of illusion -- mountains, for instance, always look blue in the distance.

The shade of blue Gallois employs is the same used for chroma-key special effects. The technique involves shooting a scene against a blue screen, then feeding in another background to convince us that actors are flying or on Mars, for example, instead of in a television studio. Blue complements Caucasian skin tones (commonly found in the foreground of scenes), thus simplifying the post-production switch. If Gallois' installation were subjected to this technique, it would (like a mirage) dematerialize. Neat. But whatever Gallois' intentions, it can't end there. The intensity of the blue and the completeness of its coverage recall late modernism (most obviously Yves Klein) and its tradition of blue pigment as suggestive of metaphysical transformation, transcendence, immateriality and the sublime.

Even without these links the saturation of colour is intoxicating. Desire, inherent in mirages, is at once heightened and frustrated by the coolness and distance the colour lends the scene. The empty monochromatic surface of Flesh functions as a screen onto which we can project our fantasies. It's the intense darkness inside the tent that is most suggestive here, the canopied bed piquing our interest with its promise of steamy, heady sex scenes.

There's something detached and alienating about the work too -- the tableau hovers on its platform in the gallery space like an apparition, daring us to suspend our disbelief. Borrowing the artifice of cinema, Gallois has created his own dream factory, one that tantalizes with the inaccessibility of the pure pleasure it promises. And while Flesh flaunts its surface, like the best cinematography, it also hints at something deeper, and it's this slippage that engages us beyond the initial sensation.