Martin Kersels

For the last twenty-odd years, the Californian artist Martin Kersels has been using his body and its "spin-offs", or "performance objects". In the act of falling or of throwing his friends into the air, his body describes actions that are apparently simple, almost banal, but which in reality possess considerable tension and prove comic and disturbing all at once. His giant installations with their subverted functions (Loud House, 1998), and his performances reconstructed through photography, all explore a world of excess. Here we find a distant echo of the exceeding of limits typical of the American artist Chris Burden – Kersels was his student and assistant – from whom he stands apart through a distanced approach with bitter-sweet humour. "My better works have that wink-wink humour mixed with a tragic element." This evening, Martin Kersels presents a selection of his works and a performance.