Todd Gray: Portals
Perrotin, Los Angeles, US
Chloé Delarue: TAFAA—OBSCENE TEARS
galerie frank elbaz, Paris, FR
Now on view at galerie frank elbaz in Paris, TAFAA – OBSCENE TEARS marks Geneva-based artist Chloé Delarue’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Running through December 27, 2025, the show introduces a new chapter within Delarue’s evolving speculative matrix, TAFAA—an acronym for Toward A Fully Automated Appearance—which she has been developing over the past decade. As a framework for inquiry, TAFAA reflects on the accelerating interpenetration of technology, systems of representation, and the human affective sphere. With OBSCENE TEARS, Delarue continues this trajectory, creating a dense, affectively charged environment of sculptural forms, light, and altered organic matter.
The works presented form a constellation of recent pieces that consider how emotions—tears, doubt, grief, memory—are mediated through increasingly abstracted, machinic systems. Within TAFAA, Delarue has developed distinct subseries, each probing a different facet of this entanglement between the organic and synthetic, the subjective and systemic. In this exhibition, she deepens her engagement with the material and symbolic residues of representation, opening new pathways through what she calls a “generative necro-aesthetic”—an approach that recomposes dead cultural material into new forms of presence. At the heart of the exhibition is TAFAA – Daisy Chain (Unnecessary Doubt), a sculptural assemblage in which a replica of a dead oak trunk, a bare IT server rack, and a mummified animal simulacrum are staged in eerie convergence. From the creature’s open mouth emerges a delicate strand of argon plasma—a glowing thread that flickers between the symbolic and the technological. The work suggests not an end but an extended process of decomposition, where organic remnants become reactivated as images and energies in flux.
Delarue’s material choices are integral to her conceptual lexicon. Latex is frequently used as a capturing membrane—akin to a second skin—that retains surface imprints before being sealed under resin. The result is a hybrid object: simultaneously archival and synthetic, both witness and artifact. Across the exhibition, works from the UNNECESSARY DOUBT (SNITCH) subseries apply this process to vegetal components. Leaves are inscribed with digital iconographies lifted from virtual visual vocabularies, then cast in latex and resin, as if fossilizing fragments of the internet in a biological substrate. These surfaces, bathed in amber-hued light, dissolve the binaries of nature and code, memory and image, presence and trace. The exhibition’s atmosphere is immersive and disquieting. Delarue stages her assemblages in a lighting environment that recalls clinical spaces and dream sequences alike—cool glows, soft pulses, chromatic flickers. This sensory architecture amplifies the works’ emotional tenor: quiet, fragmented, searching. The “obscene” of the title—often associated with that which should remain hidden—becomes here a site of exposure. Tears are rendered not as sentimental discharge but as carriers of data, of memory, of system overload.
For more information, please consult galerie frank elbaz’s website here.
Last Updated on November 26, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
