Review: Oli Sorenson's Après moi le déluge at Art Mûr

Après moi le déluge is Oli Sorenson’s new show at Art Mûr. Christine Blais’ gallery text frames the theme of the exhibition this way:

The phrase coined by Louis XV at the end of his reign, indifferent to the consequences of his extravagant actions, then taken up by Karl Marx to stigmatize the bourgeoisie of his day, ‘Après moi le déluge’ (After me the flood) is used today to highlight the tensions of individual profit on populations and nature, on the precipice of ecological catastrophe.

In PR materials, Sorenson tends to cite “remix culture” as an influence, one evidenced the most obviously in his re-tooling of Hollywood films and posters, but also present here in the plucking of work from various series shown elsewhere. The work at Art Mûr mostly seems to come from The Zombie Capitalism series, which itself is an extension of the Anthropocene (2021) and Capitalocene (2022) projects. 

Spread over half of the second floor, the exhibition is a mixture of large and small pieces. A lot of the work in the show is acrylic, spray paint, and collage on canvas. There are some painted boards pasted in, some small washed-out works that are a bit sketchier while the larger works are flashy, hard edged, and usually flat. Smaller works are in watercolour. As much as anything else, they resemble some of the advertising-inspired non-representational painting of the later 1950s and early 60s. Probably the most visually impressive work is Oil Spill (2024) which spreads out across one alcove, from a distance suggesting the illusionistic texture of fake fur.

In their graphic qualities they most strongly suggest early video games and the iconography of industrial signage, the latter being the closest thing to an indexing tool to their supposed referent. The thematic aspect, largely expressed through titles and these industrial borrowings, makes the works partially illustrative and this is where its conceptual clashes become more evident. Games suggest simulations and this is where the other major component of the work comes in.

The pieces on display draw the most heavily from Neo-Geo/Simulationism works such as those of Peter Halley. His practice was rooted in a turn away from the artistic mediation of “nature” and what he perceived as the “spiritual” toward an investment in “social issues” or “culture” as the matter to be meditated on. This was expressed largely in the theoretical framing he gave his work within the art milieu’s media system and in a visual language that filtered aspects of abstraction expressionism through the new forms of industrial paint media that became popularized after its decline. The simplified forms that he appropriated from this older tradition were “socialized” by analogy (Rothko’s structures could be reconfigured as TV screens or prison cells), but primarily by his paratextual performances as a media figure.

The absence of this media ecology and the general lack of a more sophisticated use of visual rhetoric for the sake of activist buzzwords may explain why quite a bit of Sorenson's exhibition feels like extracts from a badly made educational video game, one which has been dissected, is no longer playable, and has simply become décor. A suitable fate for work ostensibly concerned with panic about the “environment.” None of this explains the basic kitsch of the whole show and the extent to which it severely ironizes this content unless one argues that it satirizes its supposed environmental message.

It may be because this seems to be so obviously the case, that the framing of the work tries so hard to obscure it. We are told that the use of aerosols and oil paints are ways of “demonstrating the vulnerability of the human being, of the artist.” [Do these do this any more than any other material decision or is this just some forced pathos?] Working on the “human scale” even if using abstract language [What is the real conflict here?], Sorenson is “archiving real events relatively close to us, yet completely avoidable.” [But he isn’t. He is abstracting media events.] All of this is part of “the dramatic shift in the treatment of the human as a resource, on a par with material and commercial resources [This has been happening for centuries and applies equally to the rhetoric of things as varied as slavery and DEI as historical phenomena], recalls the fundamentally relational approach of Sorenson's practice. [“Relational” because he uses analogies?] Moreover, the artist mobilizes audiences [How?] by tackling head-on [It is pretty circuitous] the irrational drift [It is hyper-rationalized] and denial [It is a completely overt and heavily exploited media spectacle] in the face of the collective experience of climate change…”

Even with this kind of framing, presumably, or at least performatively, unintentionally (the hashtags he applies to his work on social media stress its “activist” and “Marxist” character), the work itself suggests a satire of the ecological thematic more than anything else. Not only is the visual language it employs a readymade that has been appropriated (a recycling of a recycling), so is the limited set of discursive clichés that are used to enframe it.

The hollowness of this is nowhere more evident than in the video piece sitting in the second room that suggests a miming of early MTV aesthetics as a series of ecological buzzwords are blandly read off in ways that are largely vapid. This is only intensified by the fact that, unlike Halley, Sorenson does not have the same kind of media ecosystem to plug his discourse into and within which his images can circulate, and this changes the performative nature of the work. 

This can be seen when you put this work in the context of recent shows that have been mentioned here which reinforces its blandly generic quality. The trope of the Anthropocene, and the visual rendering of it in reference to abstraction, has been central to Burtynsky for years. The use of 80s graphic language and abstraction has been central to Nicolas Grenier’s far more complex and detailed examinations of the relationships between commerce, spatial planning, and the environment. The same polemical points were also made more coherently, and in an equally “childish” manner to Sorenson, by Clément de Gaulejac (among others in the past few months). And both the polemic and the visual strategy of Sorenson are employed also in the show Brume by the pixels collectif, currently running at Topo only a few blocks from Art Mûr.

The overarching sense of Sorenson's show has the most in common with more recent trends to things like vaporwave. This is true of the general graphic quality, the colour scheme, the affective sense that falls somewhere between comedy and melancholy under a neon glow. If there is a banal nostalgia for the barely remembered but overly familiar, it is a nostalgia for ruins that suggests the romantic illusion at the heart of ecologism and its zombified fantasy of capitalism, an illusion since there was never a nature to be polluted, only an ecology of tropes. The logic of the work evacuates it of any content other than this recycling and its residual glamour. Like a remastered Depeche Mode B-side, it is pleasant even if the lyrics are asinine. 

* Header photo from the gallery site, other photos taken from the artist's Instagram.