Pain[ peyn ] Quotidien
Brasserie Atlas, Brussels
13 - 21 October 2022
“It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs” - In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell, 1935
Pain[ peyn ] Quotidien is part exhibition, part short story. It is a narrative told through text, image, and objects:
Of an unemployed baker in a city under quarantine.
Of a forgotten architecture of the rich: decorative stone decrottoirs tucked into walls and nestled beside doorways.
Of a forgotten economic arrangement and scatological practice sometimes called “night soil”.
Of the distribution of wealth and trickle-down economics (but why eat the rich when they have such bad taste?).
Of a daily cycle of consummation and consumption, and the rabid insistence on limitless growth.
Of a world of ladders – the housing ladder, the social ladder, the next rung on the career ladder – forever on the verge of melting down and burning out.
Of a candle burning at both ends forever.
Pain[ peyn ] Quotidien derives its title from the international chain of bakeries – an American company with a French name. Christopher Beauregard is an American artist with a French surname. The title of this exhibition has a twinned meaning; it can either be understood as the daily production of bread, or, taken differently, it becomes an everyday kind of toil and suffering. Pain and peyn. Both are renewed daily, entwined in a cycle that plays out in perpetuity. Both are ephemeral but eternal, fresh but iterative.
Beauregard deploys doorways and windows as found contexts to work within. They are framing devices that group and project meaning onto an installation of cast objects and forms. It’s a generative arena to work within. Transitional spaces supply their own rules; they come with rituals and suggest objects that can convey either invitation or exclusion. A statue of a cat with a candle on its head, a set of iron bars, a
decrottoir. The decrottoir in particular. It is a ubiquitous and now entirely decorative element adorning the facades of Brussels homes. They are vestigial and go largely unnoticed. They mark a brief moment in the city’s history when it became fashionable for the very rich to be seen walking. Walking through streets of shit.
The exhibition weaves together sculpture, photographs, and text to create a fictional world that connects the presence of decrottoirs with the practice of night soil whereby,before the advent of indoor plumbing, excrement was collected from the homes of the wealthy and utilised as agricultural fertiliser.
Pain[ peyn ] Quotidien is an alternate reality where excrement is taken from decrottoirs and used to grow grain that becomes bread. It is an integrated model of trickle-down economics: part eat the rich, part shit sandwich.
