August 28th - 30th
La Cartonnerie, le grand Plateau, le petit Plateau
Friche la Belle de Mai
41, rue Jobin
13003 Marseille
Art-O-Rama marks the first collaboration between DS Galerie (Paris) and Xxijra Hii (London). Conceived specifically for the fair, this presentation brings together works by Max Blotas and Glen Pudvine, whose practices converge around a shared inquiry into contemporary forms of sociability, exploring the relationships between constructed spaces, systems of representation, and the presence of the body.
Max Blotas’s installations function as stage devices: temples, offices, or nightlife spaces appear as mechanized models, activated and filmed live. These worlds, which initially seem immersive, gradually reveal their artificiality. With “Le Dauphin / Private Eyes” (2026), he reconstructs the scene of an underground nightclub in a robotic form. Hidden behind ventilation grilles, this miniature architecture (built at a 1:20 scale) is visible only through a video surveillance system broadcasting a live feed of the model’s interior. The space then takes on the characteristics of a spectral place: a lingering but bodiless celebration, where collective energy remains as a trace: a mechanical memory of the party.
Faced with this collective space emptied of its substance, Glen Pudvine’s paintings reintroduce the body as a site of intensity and vulnerability. Drawing on both classical painting and contemporary conceptions of the self, his nude figures appear in situations of radical exposure, blending personal anxieties, humor and grotesque imagery. Their presence oscillates between an existential dimension and a deliberately offbeat register, where the body becomes simultaneously a mythological subject and an absurd figure: an object of contemplation, projection and staging. In “Turkish Get Up in Caravaggio” (2025), the artist depicts himself, naked and almost life-size, in an image whose frontality directly confronts the viewer with his presence.
The encounter between these two practices creates a tension between a collective space that has become mechanical and a body that has once again become profoundly singular. In Max Blotas’s work, sociability appears as a mechanical trace. In Glen Pudvine’s, the body becomes the stage for an individual ritual, somewhere between introspection, exhibition and performance. Between decor and presence, their works reinterpret certain fictions of our present.
All enquiries to info@xxijrahii.net