40mcube
48, avenue Sergent Maginot
35000 Rennes

Alan Fertil & Damien Teixidor borrow objects and attitudes from D.I.Y ethics, skateboarding and the urban landscape, taking their current research towards certain forms of exoticism. Their work leans on analogy principles to bring underground and specific histories towards common and familiar grounds.

Fertil and Teixidor ’s exhibition at 40mcube is conceived as an hybrid space at the crossroads between common public squares and mythical places such as Venice Beach Pit, an abandoned beach resort in California that became an emblematic skateboard spot in the 80s, Tiki Gardens, a floridian amusement park inspired by Polynesian culture, or Las Pozas, a surrealist concrete city builded by Edward James in the mexican jungle. This three sites, that are also contemporary ruins, shows successive and different uses from which emerge new mythology or a kind of esotericism.

Arcane Vanilla gathers works similar to street furniture, like fountains or flower display cases decorated with mosaic, and sculpted masks or printed fabric. The exhibition takes the appearance of a memorial dedicated to an imaginary place, with its relics, fossils and emblems. It also shows the difficult but feasible conciliation between arcane secret and absolute banality, and the possibility for urbanity and exoticism to merge one into another.