Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)

After all, the uniformity of the box plunges the scene into a homogeneous framework (‘they all look just the same’) with an invasive power that slips into your brain like a melody. In Rochereau’s work, the box eliminates both its context and its contents: it wipes out their respective singularities, limiting itself to the observation of surfaces. In a visual doubling, the painting itself seems to copy the tactile nature of cardboard, with layers of paint that are sometimes so thick that you would like to pull on them the way you pull off the tape on a package.  The ‘little boxes’ are found everywhere. Depending on their composition, they oscillate between carefully arranged stacks and overflowing accumulation, ‘a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order,’ [2] as the flâneur Benjamin unpacking his library would say. This bizarre hoard, beige or sometimes verging on ghostly shades of gray, seems to reveal ‘a very mysterious relationship to ownership.’ [3] In Rochereau’s stacked boxes and cleaned-out storefronts there is something of the spectral nature of merchandise and the fetishism that Marx attributes to it—because the abstraction of labor-value finds itself transfigured in these boxes with no sender and no future, which haunt the painting to the point of saturating its every angle. The way the container has been sensualized recalls unboxing rituals seen in videos where palms gently caress the box and artificial fingernails tap on it, the contact of the acrylic and cardboard sometimes multiplied by hypnotic sound effects. ‘And when I peeled [the cardboard] off, it felt so soft. Hear that?’ murmurs Whispered ASMR to her 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, slowly opening the package of her order from a worldwide cosmetics chain. Like contouring, wood surrounds the edges of the canvas, highlighting or repeating its shades, the frame becoming in turn yet another act of packing: boxes inside boxes, like matryoshka dolls ad nauseam.  Boxes in boxes could very well be the title of a series of sculptures that Rochereau produces at each new exhibition. In her installations, we will always find boxes, because the obsession persists, but this time intended for the storefront instead of the basement. These display stands are the same color as cardboard and their construction follows the same pared-down principle: facing us, a Tetris of cabinets and displays, a quasi-literal way of dismantling the staging, of merging the store window with what happens behind the scenes.  The title Screen in play / Screen out of play also refers to the idea of spectacle, while putting its own spin on Shakespearian time that is ‘out of joint,’ just like these pieces of furniture that have lost their functionality. Forever (2024) evokes suspended time; Stars, preservation, conservation (2024) or Pack to the future (2025), a logic of anticipation; and, seen together, all these boxes resonate like a symbol of expectation. Rochereau takes stock of places, times, and commerce. In these packaged displays, waiting to be tossed in the garbage, we may read a reference to the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, a nostalgic nod to the era of shop windows whose only traces here are a few metallic ribbons. These ‘rectilinear armatures of commodity mobility’ [4] also become the symbol of a virtual economy, where shipping and handling in the warehouses of multinational corporations has replaced transactions in the social space of the store. The architect Xavi L. Aguirre has described the cardboard box as a ‘logistical unit of the material world’ and the ‘point of contact where the physical becomes data [...] a subliminal force in the construction of space; a form of thought, an ordering system, an icon.’ [5] These artworks also tell us what sorting systems say about the arrangement of the world, be it structural or subjective. They present themselves as exercises in the representation of absence and the circulation of desire and memory. Something intimate thus resists the anonymity of these scenes; and on the labels indexing Rochereau’s shoeboxes, we can detect antiquated notations: these numbers are in fact the birthdays of the artist’s closest friends. 

_{[1] Weeds was written by Jenji Kohan and appeared on Showtime from 2005 to 2012. The main character, Nancy Botwin, lives in the California suburb of Agrestic. Raising her children alone after the sudden death of her husband, she turns to drug dealing to maintain her lifestyle.} 

_{[2] Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’ (1931), trans. Harry Zohn. In Illuminations (Schocken Books: 1969), p. 60.} 

_{[3] op. cit., p. 43.} 

_{[4] Xavi L. Aguirre, ‘Boxed In: The Aesthetics of Material Circulation,’ e-flux journal, 2019.}  

_{[5] Ibid.}