Banks Violette at BPS 22, Charleroi 

Banks Violette – The bees made honey in the lion’s skull (2005-2023)
Curator : Pierre-Olivier Rollin, BPS22, Charleroi. 
Du 20 février au 5 mai 2024. 

Banks Violette is 50 years old. Since the mid-2000s, he has been developing a body of work made up of large-scale minimalist sculptures and installations with references to theatre, inspired by black-and-white graphics and the sonic atmospheres of punk and metal. The former enfant terrible of contemporary art returned to live in Ithaca, his hometown in upstate New York, in 2014. That same year, the Province of Hainaut, through BPS22, acquired one of his works. It has to be said that Banks Violette and Charleroi have mining affinities. The Ithaca region is famous for its salt mines, and the black coal mines of Hainaut are its negative. Ten years after this acquisition, the Belgian institution is organising the artist’s first retrospective in Europe, featuring some forty historic and recent works, marking his major return to the forefront of the artistic scene. The title, “The bees made honey in the lion’s skull”, is taken from a 2009 album by the group Earth, whose drone metal, initiated by the group’s founder, inspires the artist, as do other styles derived from heavy metal. Banks Violette has been interested in the imagination and imagery of these subcultures since she was a teenager. 

The exhibition opens with one of the two elements of the diptych that structures it, the installation Sunn O))) (black stage/coma mirror) (2006), a memory of a performance given by the band Sunn O))) from a stage in a completely enclosed space, with the singer placed in the coffin at the front of the stage. In the art centre’s other large room, the installation Sunn O)))/repeater (decay/coma mirror) (2006) – which has been part of the collection of the Province of Hainaut since 2014 – appears as a ghostly evocation of the group, a replica of the stage eaten away by the salt. Salt concentrates all the paradoxes: it both sterilises and preserves. Instruments, stacks of amplifiers, acoustic panels… everything seems petrified, while the now black coffin is totally destroyed. This trace of the past, of an event that took place, evokes the romantic side of the artist, a romanticism à la Caspar David Friedrich that, pushed to its extremes, leads to nationalism. 

From the outset, Banks Violette’s value on the art market soared. He became the darling of the galleries who asked him to produce more and more. He started taking hard drugs. Between 2008 and 2020, the artist went through a period of gradual withdrawal from the art scene, punctuated by stays in detox clinics. He returned to large-scale installations in 2023, when the French fashion house Céline – Hedi Slimane had already collaborated with the artist in the 2010s, when he was at Dior – commissioned a set of fourteen large chandeliers, two of which are on show here. Made from industrial white fluorescent tubes and named Thrones, they are self-portraits, sometimes triumphant, sometimes collapsed. Although the sculptures are minimalist, the cables hang like chains. 

Upstairs, a strange sculpture in the shape of a motorbike lies petrified on the floor. On 1 January 2005, the American artist Steven Parrino (1958-2005) died in a road accident while celebrating New Year’s Eve at Banks Violette. Zodiac (F.T.U.)/74 ironhead SX (2008-2009) is an exact replica of Parrino’s Harley-Davidson. Each piece was moulded in silicone and then duplicated with a mixture of salt and transparent polyurethane resin, before being assembled on the floor to form the ‘motorbike sculpture’. On the wall behind her, a drawing of a rose placed on the floor accentuates the homage to the man who made her name on the art scene. From her very first exhibitions, Banks Violette exhibited drawings alongside her installations and sculptures. This exhibition presents around twenty of them, mostly dating from 2009 to 2022. Unlike his other plastic forms, he has never stopped drawing. The images he produces use symbols of the American way of life that he hijacks, such as the upside-down American flag, the mustang (wild horse) represented in negative, rather like medical imagery, or the inscription American standard, on a black background, taken from a famous brand of toilet paper, or more tragic images of this relationship to violence particular to the United States, such as Bela Lugosi, the famous actor from Dracula, here incarnating Christ. 

On the way back down to the first room, opposite Sunn O))), there is a curved wall made up of sixteen mirrors that were shattered during the vernissage using hydraulic jacks at the back of the structure. In this 2007 performance sculpture, Banks Violette presents the result of a past action that led to a situation of chaos, a state of destruction that would spontaneously be perceived as negative, but which the concept of sympathy for the devil, specific to rock and metal culture, manages to make seductive. The work also demonstrates the importance of the reverse for the artist. It contrasts with the minimalist, uncluttered right side, leaving all the elements of the artifice visible – the wires, the connections, the plaster… The reverse side acts as a backdrop for the work. The whole is very theatrical. 

A broken stage, a charred wooden structure reminiscent of the architecture of concert stages and the installations of the American minimalist artist Sol Lewitt, has a salt and resin replica of a microphone suspended from its centre like a gallows. The shadows of leafless trees, reproduced in the background with adhesive tape, complete the tragic ambience of Voidhanger (twin channel)/all tomorrows grave (2006), a new translation by the artist of the favourite themes of German Romanticism, such as a taste for ruin. The exhibition closes with a photograph: a broken guitar, a white-on-black object made from an alloy of salt and resin. It is a reproduction of a Fender guitar designed by Kurt Cobain shortly before his death and never sold on the market. For Banks Violette, the greatest chicles have the deepest meaning.  

Head image : Banks Violette, Voidhanger (twin channel)_all tomorrows graves 2006 @BPS22. Vanhaerents Art Collection (Bruxelles). Photo Leslie Artamonow

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