Ubay recreates these sign-of-status objects: precious materials, appropriate forms or unique experiences that project luxury on us—not only on the one who acquires them as products, but on anyone who lives under the same system where its reign is supreme. The capacity of emptying and filling all the things within our reach as receptacles makes each one of our decisions shroud us in the brand of ourselves. Individuals stand as psychological subjects while their material reality disappears. Broken and decomposed, their only objective is to recompose themselves, identify their traumas and their vocations and eventually find themselves in their self-realisation. The greatest form of reconstruction that the logic of fashion permits them is that of productive consumption. As in all ideological programmes, its manifestations are self-evident: thus mobility and access as markers of privilege or the economy of attention act as tangible values. On an unstoppable trajectory towards the immaterial, subjects recompose themselves in their acts of consumption while their flesh and bones become ethereal.
In his scenarios, as in window designs or in the layout of a new catalogue of season furniture, the artist borrows the forms and compositions, ruptures and tears of several avant-gardes. The satiny, the bright, the reflective, the dramatic and the voluptuous of some of them coexist with the flat, the cut, the cold and the calculated of the other. The forms, colours and abstract lines, whether minimal or overflowing, detach themselves from their programmatic past to surrender to the evidence that there isn’t any con, revolution, alternative or protection, that everything that was, is now ‘up for grabs’. Just as in magazines, scenarios become a ‘background’ where the body gives shape to materials and objects (fabrics, armchairs and tea cups are made to their measure), but where it is already absent. Repetitions, déjà-vus, games of mirages and deformities point to the capacity to mould the image (of that body that is missing in the work of art): the skin, as a surface made up of digits, is now adapted to the bony structure of a system that requires bodies to be as transparent and available as possible.
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[1] Jean Baudrillard describes fashion as a phenomenon inseparable from consumption, and them both as factors of social inertia in the chapter “Sign-Function and Class Logic” of his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press Publishing, U.S., 1st edition (June 1, 1981)
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