An Unpardonable Sin

“It is not easy for art, which has no movement, to produce an action whose movement creates the whole soul.”

- Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, Histoire de Juliette

For those in Paris, I recommend visiting castillo/corrales's latest exhibition, An Unpardonable Sin, curated by Philippe Pirotte. The exhibition is centred around French revolutionary writer Marquis de Sade and his ideas about pleasure being not a luxury but a human right and the resultant paradox within bourgeois society, which sees fantasy and symbolic law as incomparable. The exhibition also examines the ‘aesthetics of disenchantment’ and Sade's use of absurdity to expose the weaknesses of Reason. As Pirotte writes, 'An Unpardonable Sin wants to address the way in which perversion can be an aesthetic category without necessarily being a moral one.'

Pirotte continues that 'through a research of detachment, the exhibition An Unpardonable Sin could take position in relation to fundamental sentiments such as the interpersonal and the philanthropic, which in the art world are often turned into a (condescending and useless) do-good and feel-good moralism.' The exhibition is wonderfully irreverent, self-questioning and medium-unspecific, seeming to probe many questions mentioned above while simultaneously saying little more than "enjoy!"


An Unpardonable Sin runs through September 11 and features the work of Carla Arocha, Matthew Brannon, Aaron Flint Jamison, Owen Land, Marcel Mariën, Olivier Mosset, Tracey Rose, Narcisse Tordoir and David Gheron Tretiakoff, among many others. castillo/corrales is at 65 rue Rébeval 75019 Paris.