Antoine Catala: I Love You, I Love You | 47 Canal
This show involves an impressive amount of production infrastructure: darkened galleries, humidifiers and “hydrophobic coating”, whatever that is.
It’s needed, because its images are excruciatingly fragile and ephemeral: fingertip drawings, of a kind rubbed on a steamy glass shower screen. (The shower screens in the gallery are actually plexiglas boxes, which look kind of the same, especially when it’s dark.)
What’s the point of the show? The artist answers with a question. “What are traces of love?” Antoine Catala states in the show notes. “How about a fleeting intimate moment, a drawing in condensation after a shower? Can love be captured? Can it be transmitted? What about its absence, phantom love? Does it always have to hurt?”
The drawings are simple. One’s just a heart shape. Another’s a simple I LOVE YOU message. Another’s a dick, ejaculating still more love hearts.
I thought, as I walked around - what a lot of effort has been made in order for me to see these drawings! Not just the production infrastructure, but the money: Catala’s show stretches across several rooms of doubtless extremely expensive Tribeca gallery space. And what’s the reward for all that effort: how on earth can he sell this work?
“Love, I would add, in all of its candor and manipulative undertones, started to feel like an act of resistance,” Catala explains. Accordingly, my practical concerns drifted away.
I realised: all this is as nonsensically complicated, as on-the-face-of-it absurd, as cussedly pointless, as being in love. These fragile, simple drawings made it here, somehow. Objectively, it wasn’t worth it, but for some reason, it’s enough.
Antoine Catala: I Love You, I Love You is at 47 Canal (New York City). 04 April - 03 May 2025