Luxury is personal, a collaborative exhibition for Condo Mexico City, hosted by anonymous with Relaciones Públicas.

Text by Philippa Snow

Inherent in the idea of luxury is the notion of something being rarefied, or quite literally rare. Many of the things that we define as “luxurious” are, therefore, at best exclusive, and at worst exclusionary. Characterised by a heat-forged alembic of painstaking craft, subtle wit, and geographical and historical specificity, the work of the multidisciplinary Mexican artist Arlette is certainly luxurious, but it is also deeply personal—its baroque intricacy and its frequent use of heavy-grade materials, including metal and volcanic rock, are offset by its ongoing exploration of deeply human themes and feelings. Amusement and arousal, in particular, emanate from surprising places in her sculptures, just as they sometimes take us by surprise in real life. With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that for Luxury is personal—a collaborative show for Condo CDMX—a new piece by Arlette appears in concert with three works by Martine Syms, another multidisciplinary figure whose practice combines theory, memoir, popular culture, gender politics, sex, and a wicked sense of humour. Like Arlette, Syms may show within the art world, but her practice is routinely energised by the desire to poke fun at its absurdity and self-seriousness; she is political and playful. In general, her output has the cool, scrappy, half-genius-and-half-bonkers vibe of an online fanpage for a pop star that is maintained by an academic.

Here, that elevation of fandom and femininity takes literal form: the three collages in this exhibition, one of which is the titular Luxury is personal, first appeared in a 2021 Syms show called Loot Sweets, which itself originated with the artist’s visit to an auction of the singer Janet Jackson’s costumes. Syms, attending as a fan, won an Alexander McQueen jacket that once belonged to the singer, and the sense of psychic communion that she felt with Jackson as a result inspired a series of works that explored the relationship between objects—merchandise, ephemera and designer clothes, yes, but also art objects, and objects of cultural significance—and the self. Arlette’s complimentary piece, Couch, is one whose magnitude and heft are unprecedented in her previous practice: a couch, made of bronze, weighing 350kg and reproduced at full, authentic scale. It is another exercise in canonising an item of personal, or domestic, significance. A couch, after all, is usually confined to the home, and designed to be utilised without drawing much attention to itself. Here, it becomes a monument: a thing legitimised by graft, craft, weight, and cost. (On its reverse is the impression of a man’s muscular back, meaning that it’s also something of a monumental paean to sensuality, and more specifically to the desirability of hot men.) In acknowledging the degree to which our own individual histories are assembled from a collage of experiences and acquisitions, Syms produces her own monuments, too: to Black excellence, to the appreciation of gorgeous things, and to the dizzying power of nostalgia. In Luxury is Personal and beyond, both artists’ works successfully transmogrify the singular and personal into something bigger, sexier, and grander—if not always literally in scale, then certainly in significance.