Tout Va Bien

Advertising slogans, punning neon signs, chocolate brand and movie studio logos – Ste?phan Landry’s variegated world of fiction and commerce is a Hollywood idyll in which, as the slogan goes, “Tout va bien”. On sheets of A3 paper during and after his training in Geneva, on squared loose-leaf during his wanderjahre, then softened recycled paper due to dire straits, Landry created a veritable Warholian alphabet executed in techniques ranging from gouache, ink, glaze, synthetic varnish to Tipp-Ex. The happiness industry may pitch the bright side of life as loudly as it likes: Landry bares its underlying mechanisms by means of exaggeration, turning his pop art into an intimate portrait of the artist and his everyday environs. Landry’s signature mischievousness is all over his iconic works, and he invests them with a sensuality that is less sumptuous than explicit. And yet there they are, anonymous and isolated from the world, silhouettes frail as those by Markus Raetz.