https://richardr.org/dadhouse 2026-04-02T23:19:08+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2869698154475533519765849516697/Artboard-29-copy-13.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2869780259605240027673004616345/Untitled-3.png https://richardr.org 2026-05-03T14:40:03+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/P2866500605708358041449632639641/Untitled-3.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/A2866500723712179880969634327193/Artboard-29-copy-13.png <column-set gutter="1"><column-unit slot="0"> Exhibition text by Ingrid Luquet-Gad What we’re looking at is a self-contained world: a no-frills structure, slanted or studded, standing over its surroundings like a watchtower. We quickly realize that this building isn’t one of a kind: it has multiplied, endlessly repeating itself with minor variations. It is obvious that none of these structures were built to fit in but much rather to wall themselves off from their surroundings. The private sphere is jealously guarded, and all intruders are kept out, be it weather, predators, or casual passers-by. In The Moral Order of a Suburb (1988), sociologist Mary Pat Baumgartner already described the “moral minimalism” of suburban housing, where houses and urbanism reflect a desire to avoid conflict and, above all, any contact with the Other. At first glance, “Dadhouse” (2025), Xavier Mazzarol’s new exhibition series, resembles paintings of generic units built to house a nuclear family. The life-sized oil paintings loom over visitors, drawing them in and pushing them away at the same time. Hung in a frieze, they fill the room and make the weight of standardization feel physical. Only these aren’t homes; they’re birdhouses. Mazzarol drew his subject the conformist world he grew up in and eventually left behind. He asked his father, who had already made several of those, to produce more. These then provided the starting point for his own artistic endeavor. Here, what emancipates the series from repetition is color. Tones bleed into one another, wrapping the rigid grid in a shimmering, romantic1 haze not unlike a dreamy screensaver. Mazzarol drew inspiration from Gilbert Baker who designed the rainbow flag in 1978: a queer, pacifist symbol that has floated above our gatherings of protest and celebration ever since. Where Baker gave each of the flag’s eight colors a specific meaning, Mazzarol reinterprets them freely, treating them as elements of a palette where combinations happen arbitrarily2. These fluid shifts, where nothing quite changes, yet nothing is fixed, recall the use of color in postmodern design: the Memphis Group, Ettore Sottsass, Nathalie Du Pasquier. In his essay Essence and Model (1988), Peter Halley, an artist known for his love of Day-Glo and his writings on geometric urbanism, describes what he calls the « hyper-realization » of modernism’s elements. Each era, he argues, hyper-realizes the one before it by reworking its building blocks. “No meaning is final,” he writes, “and signifiers are arrayed, one after another, in an endless, circular progression. The circle is the meta-sign of the hyper-modern.3” This brings us finally to the circle as it appears in “Dadhouse”. At the heart of each hyper-cell sits a cyclopean opening of stubborn darkness. Nothing filters through from the outside, and this hole feels more like a border than a passage. Mazzarol singles out this motif in three of the paintings, as if to amplify its evocative pull. The metonymic element conjures the lure of the forbidden and the draw of the unknown, forming not quite an invitation but an incitation hard to resist. The meaning of cyclical reinvention is encapsulated in such a gate: one of the self, of ways of living, and of ephemeral encounters that slip outside the frame. [translated from French] _________________ 1. Xavier Mazzarol mentions the influence of the Theory of Colours [Farbenlehre] written by the German Romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810. 2. The title of each painting specifies the two hues combined to achieve its chromatic register, naming them by their symbolic designation. Namely: Sunlight (yellow), Healing (orange), Nature (green), Life (red), Sex (pink), Serenity (indigo), Spirit (violet), Magic (turquoise). 3. Peter Halley, “Essence and Model” in Peter Halley, Collected Essays 1981–1987, Zürich: Edition Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, 1988).</column-unit></column-set> <a hash="U2912682267994844032911081482905" href="https://freight.cargo.site/original/i/U2912682267994844032911081482905/Exhibition-text-by-Ingrid-Luquet-Gad-english.docx.pdf" target="_blank"></a> ... https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2911315637768856536027857693337/XavierMazzarol_Dadhouse_ExhibitionView_01_GiorgiaPalmisano.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/A2911316100025816279115511638681/XavierMazzarol_Dadhouse_ExhibitionView_02_GiorgiaPalmisano.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/K2911316240700686585224552262297/XavierMazzarol_Dadhouse_ExhibitionView_03_GiorgiaPalmisano.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/O2911316350901535681565413616281/XavierMazzarol_Dadhouse_ExhibitionView_04_GiorgiaPalmisano.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/U2911316434723540752501616159385/XavierMazzarol_Dadhouse_ExhibitionView_05_GiorgiaPalmisano.jpg https://richardr.org/top-nav 2026-04-04T14:07:32+00:00 always 0.5