Messieurs Delmotte
Messieurs Delmotte making photos of the Watt's Towers in LA, December 2008
“My work is not a performance – and actually even less of a good idea.” The videos by Messieurs – or Monsieur- Delmotte spare nothing or no one and they trivialize anything that comes within his reach, including himself. His works are not self-portraits, nor transpositions of the author in one or more imaginary characters. Maybe they can only be described as playful abdications of the subject, absurd and almost surreal one-acters. Dangling somewhere between reality and fiction – or maybe these are even one and the same, exploding in a multitude of disengaged fragments. Delmotte, a self-declared poser, sneers at the institutionalized art world with his mischievous and surprising actions, trivial in content and simple in form. He takes the appearance of several archetypical cultural disciples – the American rock hero, the surly German artist, the DJ freak, the cultural politician – and he takes a stance between meaning and nonsense, between the identifiable and the surreal. The results are uncomplicated and unvarnished, but also pure and most of all irresistibly charming. Or, as Delmotte puts it himself: "Je le fais, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais je le fais!".
Messieurs Delmotte wrote that text for the video FränZ ünd KoFöN serie that was created for VOLLEVOX in 2004.
