A few days before Valentine’s Day, whereas the brazen Lovers’ parade is going to exasperate single people, ADDICT Galerie proposes a counter-celebration with Eyes’ River. Off the tissues!

Eyes’ River, Justin Morin’s first personal exhibition at ADDICT Galerie, surveys the hysteria that take the love stories away. Both acid and romantic, the exhibited pieces replay the important acts –from despair to rancour- that punctuate the breakaway. But a pain that can’t be covered up by any trick is hiding behind this extreme mise-en-scene: a heart has been broken.

If the titles of the artworks – Sniff Sniff, Last chance letters, Best Bastard award – make us smile, they only reinforce the pathos in Eyes’ River, behind the silliness and the suffering, as the exhibition’s main piece shows. Entitled Sweethurts, this sculpture made of Enamels from Longwy (mining city in Lorraine and Justin Morin’s birthplace) represents a huge pink heart, burst on the floor and stigmatised with the promise “only you”. A hundred of very small black hearts are stuck in the big shell, and on them are written messages that are the exact opposite of declarations of love. “For ever” is replaced by “Fuck you and shut up”… Bitterness, jealousy and exasperation have rotten a romance too fragile.

Questioning insistently the semantics of the thread, Justin Morin works out contemporary embroidery using industrial practices without hesitation when the manual work doesn’t suffice. We could see his performance at Villa Noailles for the edition 2006 during the International Festival of Fashion Arts in Hyeres.
Writing is another important axis of his researches. He wrote Pèlerinage sur soi, published by Actes Sud, with the Belgian choreograph Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

Crazy I’m crazy for feeling so lonely
Crazy I’m crazy for feeling so blue
I knew
You’d love me as long as you wanted
And then someday
You’d leave me for somebody new
Crazy, Patsy Cline.