The starting point for Marianne Vlaschits’ and Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin’s collaboration “Pas de Deux”—an exuberant painting series consisting of grotesquely transformed baroque draperies and still lifes—was their shared interest in concpets of kitsch and camp. In a tactic similar to Raymond Queneau’s “Exercise de Style”, in which variations on a recurring anti-story change the implications of the narrative, they created a mirror exhibition in which each painting reflects on a work oft the other artist. The resulting clash between the deliberate triviality of the motive and the virtuosity of the stylistic exercises provokes ontological questions on the capabilities and limitations of artistic expression and language as such.
