What is madness today? What new names have we given it? What ancient figures persist?
Ornela Vorpsi's paintings are inhabited by characters from the Middle Ages, as if the creatures in the works of Bosch or Bruegel had come to live alongside us. With funnels on their heads, scissors and bloody knives in their hands, they personify the eternal unreason that threatens to distract us from the unimaginative certainties that keep us safe.
Her characters are pursued by madness as well, by the madness of living. The difficulty of governing their affects makes them sick as they face up to the necessity of managing to read, to decipher and make life into a book, into paintings.
Ornela Vorpsi paints a contemporary Corpus Christi, Xanax, Valium and other chemical compounds. The ultimate Hosts that dissolve, bitter-tasting, under the tongue of millions of people, in order to turn, even briefly, their existence into something obvious and normal.
Ornela Vorpsi (Albania) is in residence as part of the Cité internationale des arts "2-12" programme.