Hidden behind the three thick roots of the Aristotelian poetic genres’ family tree; the tragedy, comedy and the epic, one finds their often-forgotten sibling, the parody. Scarcely addressed by Aristotle himself, at least in the surviving literature, the French literary critic Gérard Genette sat out to reclaim the parody into the literary fold with his 1982 seminal work Palimpsests: La Littérature au second degré. Genette presupposes two modes of production that engenders parody, namely imitation and transformation, and it is the latter which seems to best describe the process behind Axel Gouala’s metamorphic sculptural objects.
Where Ulysses recalls the Odyssey, or plaster copies their marble originals, Axel Gouala humorously transforms materials much more familiar to the denizens of the 21st century: plungers playing palms, palms playing coatracks, a mop turned snake slithering away from its bucket.
It is precisely the intimacy with which we greet these familiar materials and made-to-be-held design objects that makes the viewing of Axel Gouala’s works an almost haptic affair.
– Extract, text by Gustav Elgin, Be Magazine 28, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.