"War Won’t Work": a Deactivated Utopia. C.S. Valentin at AGO Projects

War Won’t Work is the first exhibition that C. S. Valentin (1979), a French designer based in Mexico, presents under his own name. The show features an installation that the curatorial text situates “somewhere between a teenage bedroom and a woodland shrine”—the phrase appears in English—though it reminds me more of a department store: spaced-out objects and uniform lighting. That risk always looms when exhibiting collectible design, I suppose, but AGO Projects has shown it can be avoided, as it was last December with Accesorios Espaciales by APRDELESP.

Inspired by the English utopian group The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the objects on view can be grouped into three sets: textiles (cushions, rugs, and tapestries), furniture (nightstands, credenzas, tables, cabinets, a folding screen, and a floor lamp), and ceramics (plates, planters, vessels, candles, trays, and mirrors). Of the three, the furniture strikes me as the least successful. The choice of materials—oak and pine plywood, wood more commonly associated with affordable furniture—is puzzling for an exhibition that aspires to create an artisanal, ritual atmosphere. UV printing, which typically allows for crisp imagery, seems to have been applied directly onto the surface. While this may have been a deliberate decision—allowing the pine’s grain to participate in the image—the final effect, with veins interrupting and fragmenting the natural landscapes, proves unflattering. The use of raw stones as legs, a gesture seemingly intended to bring the pieces closer to the naturalist rusticity of the Kibbo Kift, loses force in contrast with the other materials. Though intriguing, the proposal never fully consolidates into a coherent formal language and reads more as an isolated accent than as a structural decision.

By contrast, the ceramic works—directly inspired by the plates of Bernard Palissy, the celebrated sixteenth-century French landscape ceramist—are charming and playful: a respectful homage and a contemporary, relevant reinterpretation of a classic. They also draw from the artistic tradition of the country in which the artist grew up, which unfortunately brings me back to the issue of coherence. The exhibition would gain solidity if it openly presented itself as an essay on Palissy, who is not even mentioned in the curatorial text. Instead, we are offered an early twentieth-century English group as the main reference, with care taken to clarify that the link is “loose” and that the work draws from that “lineage” while speaking its own language. It would have been enough to declare an aesthetic interest in camping or encampments, without anchoring it to a historical movement to which the connection is, at best, tenuous.

In War Won’t Work, what remains of the Kibbo Kift utopia is little more than a mood board—a series of aesthetic allusions that replace ritual or communal experience. This is a common operation in contemporary design: the appropriation of radical imaginaries (communal, anti-industrial rituals) to produce objects that are politically deactivated by the very gesture that makes them marketable. And of course, one does not expect a design exhibition or gallery to spark a revolution—I would hardly look for that on the fifth floor of a building on Reforma—but the show ultimately undermines itself by brandishing a message it cannot sustain.

The friction becomes unavoidable—and almost uncomfortable—when faced with the exhibition’s title. In a present marked by armed conflicts, asserting that “war won’t work” from within a pristine camp inevitably recalls the famous War Is Over (If You Want It) proclaimed by Lennon and Yoko from a hotel bed. A well-intentioned slogan, but one poorly articulated in relation to the debates it seeks to join. Valentin’s exhibition, despite some accomplished pieces, falls into the same trap: it proposes a utopia that remains on the surface, confusing style with substance and allusion with depth.

— Lia Quezada

Translated to English by Luis Sokol