Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)

The genericity of the box then taints the entire decorum into a homogeneous background [they all look just the same], contaminating it like a melody slips into one’s brain. In Rochereau’s work, the box thus evacuates both the context in which it is placed, and the context it beholds: it wipes out the irrespective singularities to remain with surfaces. The canvas almost reproduces the tactility of cardboard, paint thickened in layers similar to the tape you’d enjoy ripping off when opening these packages. Rochereau’s little boxes oscillate between neatly arranged stacks and overflowing accumulation, ‘a dialectical tension between the poles of orderand disorder’(2) to quote the flâneur Benjamin when unpacking his library; an odd and beige hoarding syndrome, which sometimes borrows ghostly greyish hues as if to tell of an ‘enigmatic relationship towards ownership’(3). There’s somewhat of a spectral quality to the artist’s piled-up cardboard boxes and emptied out display cases, a hauntingness reminiscent of commodity fetichism – labor-value being abstracted from these boxes with neither sender nor future that obsess the painting to the point of saturating its every angle. Containers are sensualized as they would be in an unboxing video where palms caress the box and fake nails scratch it, the contact of acrylic and cardboard then amplified by hypnotic sound effects– And when I peeled it off , it felt so soft. Hear that? murmurs WhisperRed ASMR to her 1.1M Youtube subscribers when gently opening up her order from a worldwide chain of cosmetics. As with contouring, wood here surrounds the edges of the painting, highlighting its shades and features, the frame becoming in turn yet another act of packing: Boxes in boxes did warm us the title of a series of sculptures that Rochereau produces with each new exhibition. In the artist’s installations, we’ll find boxes again as the obsession persists, but this time intended for storefront rather than basement; display devices that borrow their colour from cardboard and share with it a similar pared-down principle. We see a tetris of cupboards and cabinets, dismantling the mise en scène in literal fashion, merging the frontstage with what happens behind the scenes. The title – Screenin play / Screen out of play – points back to the idea of spectacle, quoting a Shakespearean time – one that is famously ‘out of joint’, broken down like these furniture pieces that have lost all functionality. Forever (2024) calls for a suspended temporality; Stars, preservation, conservation (2024) or Pack to the future (2025), a logic of anticipation; and seen together, these boxes all resonate like the symbol of an expectation. Rochereau takes stock of places, eras and business. In these packaged displays, waiting to be carefully put away or placed into oblivion, one could see a reference to the decline of brick and mortar, a nostalgic hint to the golden age of retail and department stores through a few remaining metallic ribbons. These ‘rectilinear armatures of commodity mobility’(4) then also become the symbol of a dematerialized economy, where shipping and handling in warehouses brought by multinational corporations has replaced the transactional sociality of the store. In their analysis of the cardboard box, architect Xavi L. Aguirre thus describes it as the ‘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) Rochereau’s pieces also tell us what sorting systems say about a larger zeitgeist or worldview, be it structural or subjective. They resonate as exercises in representing absence, desire, memory; the ways in which they circulate, remain or vanish. A feeling of intimacy surprisingly pervades the anonymousness of these depictions; and on the labels indexing Rochereau’s shoeboxes, one can decipher a few dusty numbers: the birth dates of some of the artist’s closest friends.

— Salomé Burstein

_{[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.}