Porcelain dolls outfitted as French maids, their golden eyes and cherry lips bright and vacant, undeterred even though they have been tossed in the corner; a syringe to the neck of 1978’s Miss Hungaria; a three-tiered wedding cake adorned with as many bows as drops of new blood; a personal theater the size of a jewelry box, dressed in daffodil velvet and onyx ostrich feathers, looping a commercial for one carnal bloodbath of a facelift—these are some of the elements on view in the cellar
of Lucile Littot’s exhibition Sur un Air de Wagner at New Galerie in Paris. Littot has described the characters she depicts as ascending from Hell into Heaven, so it feels promising that on the floor above, just up the winding stone staircase, a roomful of paintings each depict a jumelle, or twin, of a different flavor: if you think blondes have more fun, there are a couple here for you; if rousse is more your style, she’s got you covered.
The exhibition was dreamt up at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in
Palermo, a storied inn where Richard Wagner wrote his last significant work and Raymond Roussel passed away. She held onto the standard-issue room slippers and worked in them when she returned to her Chateau Rouge studio; the paint- splattered terrycloth slides now rest at the top stair.
The multimedia artist has been creating—or, re-creating—her own Baroque era, pushing the movement’s helpless ornateness to its very limits, one so adorned with pink satin bows, operatic pitches, scalloped and gilded porcelain frames, and lacquered vanities that it begins to collapse under its own weight, and breaks through into another realm entirely. The cherubic turns sinister—suffocating—while the manicured becomes bloodthirsty and covetous.
Minor components of recent technologies ground many of these installations, reinforcing the visual style of Rococo as one strictly of the artist’s imagination and tendencies, as opposed to historical interpretation or reenactment theater. The video It’s My Party and You’ll Die if I Want You To (2018), an infomercial starring the artist as the Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary—rumored to have bathed in the
blood of virgins to maintain her youthful appearance, and tortured and killed hundreds of beautiful girls in her day to fulfill such a need—who is now a rogue plastic surgeon perfecting her technique delivering eternal youth on a cast of friends in an estate deep in the Hollywood Hills. Centered in a glittering platform, flanked by a pair of doll-sized candelabras and framed by heavy yellow velvet drapes, held back
by rich tasseled rope; the film itself is served nakedly on an iPad mini, its lightning cord conspicuously plugged into an outlet a meter below.
The immortal quality of her practice, however, comes from the spirits her works continue to host. The neo-noir ÉRÉBE (2013) has the goddess Aphrodite-Bunny, nightmare sequences, and unsolved crimes in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. Madness Grandiosa (2014), her exhibition staged in an abandoned home in Westwood, Los Angeles, was anchored by a series of precarious installations held together by the hardened wax of burning candles snuffed out: AM I THE MOST BEAUTIFL OF THE KINGDOM? (2013) congealed a Victorian mask, ballet slippers,
dolls’ eyes, and a burned cake topper holding the phrase I Love You; I WISH I WAS MAKING LOVE CAKE AS CATHERINE DENEUVE DO, MADNESS GRANDIOSA, and THE RAPE OF CHRYSIS OR REVANGE OF THE FURIES AGAINST THE ETERNAL YOUTH (all 2014) curdled similar disparate elements—though they are now one mass,
indistinguishable and inseparable.