The Kid's black eye

About the exhibition that the Templon gallery is currently devoting to the artist

It starts badly. To introduce us to the Kid, Connaissance des Arts magazine gives us an inventory of the reasons why an artist usually makes us want to yawn. Climate change, the rise of nationalism, the Covid-19 pandemic, police violence... Don't miss it! We can already imagine a dauber trying to gain the status of artist by making self-righteous speeches rather than thinking about the meaning and future of art. We will never repeat, in the face of this dominant intoxication, that it is not the value of the social ideas it conveys or promotes that makes a work of art great. But with Robin Kid, aka The Kid, we are spoiled. Hot on the heels, watch out, rock'n'roll!

Absolutely self-taught, The Kid is a little streetwise hitter who dynamites everything in his path. And that's what makes this kid great. He's a tornado who doesn't deal with any of the themes he announces but shakes them all up in a shaker to produce canvases with a punkish but surprisingly classy and glam rendering between Pop art lived as a matter of course and academicism more than digested. There is a momentum in these creations that carries everything away, transcends everything to put us in front of overloaded semiotic constructions that work artistically. Everything means everything to the point of saturation, like a guitar amp set to 11 that produces uninterrupted feedback. A gun barrel in the mouth. Like a bin of our century whose contents have been carefully varnished here and chromed there.

Easy? So far, yes. But we can't relegate The Kid's work to the rank of a simple collage of signs of the times operated with a more than union sense of balanced and aesthetic composition. No. There is a The Kid touch. And it proves to be of great finesse. It's his style, all glazes and diaphanous shadows, that allows The Kid to deliver a message where the most opposite meanings melt into each other. If The Kid has something to tell us, it is not in the addition of themes. It is in the nonsensical cohabitation of these antagonistic ideas that the artist captures our times.

Take a candy-pink-haired teenager with a black eye who looks like a boxer just out of a fight. One wonders which one? Put an American flag on the right shoulder of this fashion model as if he had just won a national championship. You can feel the sweat in this apparent respect for the Star Spangled Banner that is not used like a terry towel. What is missing? Walt Disney-style bluebirds that normally have no business being there, but which the brush manages to blend into an unlikely but nevertheless harmonious assemblage of symbols. Tribal signs with distinct plastics at the outset, but melted into the same aesthetic. And as if in the same material. Finally, place this painting in front of another equally square but slightly larger one so that its Route 66 motif is sufficiently transparent to allow the decoding of this cliché. You have a painting signed The Kid. Its title? That's where you sense you're dealing with a punk: All your Fault - I.

Captions:
THE KID - Not Normal - 2019
THE KID - Back+To+School
THE KID - Our+ Meat+Is+USA+Choice