A Cracked Polystyrene Man:
On the Politics of Self-Engendering in Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s
A Real Boy, 2024
by Johanna Siegler
At the entrance of the chapel just two minutes south of the Seine, two brunette art students, tasked with watching over the small exhibition space, share the last drags of a blunt. Heavy maroon velvet curtains part at the doorway, the smoke slipping into the fabric’s dense surface and leaving a faint haze in the unsettled air overhead. Beneath the textile threshold, checkerboard tiles delineate the architecture’s portal area beyond in stark geometry. Within the shadowed cool of this antechamber, an emptied iced tea tetra pack rests against two stacked slabs of polystyrene. Converted into a table, they carry three baguette halves painted to resemble cigarette stubs. A few steps further, the elevated, rotund fenestration filters occasional flares of amber into the chapel’s nave. Specks of light catch on the greasy, indistinct contours of a severed human trunk. In this scenery of cluttered objects, afloat in a tincture of autumn’s soft-focus twilight, the only figure standing upright is an armless mannequin wearing torn clothing and a bleak expression. Next to a calcified aquarium containing a mixture of automotive washing agent and Axe shower gel, a pipe measuring almost four meters is placed on a block of the same polystyrene. Blackened with pigment and rubbed in ointment, it appears succulent, beefy—as if wrapped in a sock of necrotic flesh.
On the occasion of the 2024 Paris Art Week and as part of Art Basel Paris’ first installation, Belleville gallery Marcelle Alix installed a sculptural intervention of French artist Jean-Charles de Quillacq in the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins —part of Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts campus. The exhibition, titled A real boy, unfolds within a site charged with the history of sculptural conservation and dislocation. As the last surviving fragment of the Petits-Augustins convent, founded in the early 17th century by Queen Marguerite de Valois, the chapel has itself undergone multiple transformations. A pivotal moment in its history occurred during the French Revolution, when archeologist Alexandre Lenoir salvaged sculptures, royal tombs, and architectural fragments from destruction, which were later relocated to the Musée des Monuments Français. In 1816, the chapel was assigned to the École des Beaux-Arts, heir to the Royal Academies, and today, preserves casts of canonical French and Italian sculptural works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, fostering the training of Paris’ Beaux-Arts students.1
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, A Real Boy, installation view, Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2024. Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
The convent’s interior is seamed by eclectic sets of sacral ornamentation and grandiose casts of sepulchral sculptures. Bodies recline in sedate unison, merging with their stony deathbeds. Against this backdrop, Jean-Charles de Quillacq stages his unlikely anatomies as if they had slipped on the cold tile: Hollowed-out lower extremities glistening with a sweaty, tainted sheen, recovering themselves in counterfeit poise, clumsily raising, or posturing to conceal a sprained ankle. The installation of A real boy also incorporates amorphous figures that resemble fleshy industrial pipes, magnified pieces of bread, cigarette butts, an aquarium—most of them propped onto polystyrene blocks. Neighbouring the shell-like anthropomorphic body parts, a work of video art is staged in front of the backdrop of a more somber reproduction of Michelangelo’s Il Giudizio Universale—perhaps the most astonishing replica in the convent’s collection. The screen alternates between close-up shots of a recumbent male body, clad only in socks and sneakers, and similarly framed fragments of a sculptural double whose materiality appears aligned with the three-dimensional objects exhibited not far from the screen. Vaulted and at times undressed, the sculptural bodies of de Quillacq’s works posture a duality of absence and extendibility. Their partial forms are suggestive of bodily depletion, yet they persist within a space whose classical coherence renders their presence both dissonant and unignorable. Scattered across the time-worn stone floor, each entering a conversation with the objects surrounding them, the works bear the character of punctuation marks attempting to engage with the miscellaneous declarations of sculptural pathos.
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Alexa, 2021. Fiberglass, epoxy, silicone, pigment, baby powder, sneaker, sock, 83 × 55 × 28 cm. Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
Becoming the Work, or The Will to Make Oneself (Again and Again)
In the work of Jean-Charles de Quillacq, the sculptural body emerges as a permeable site of aggregation. Its slick surface accommodates what the artist, together with art historian Elsa Vettier, articulates as the “dream of self-engendering (le rêve de m’auto-engendrer)” in their 2019 publication Saint-Pierre-des-corps.2 In tune with this statement and alluding to the processive somatics inherent to this body of work, de Quillacq’s sculptures refuse the canonical ideal of monumental repose. Posturing instead between collapse and recovery, his figures introduce a new sculptural condition into the space. The artist’s studio practice mirrors this inflection. Working with plastic, the most lifeless yet perversely eternal of materials, de Quillacq turns fiberglass and epoxy resin into “psychological material,”3 mixing it with sweat, semen, nicotine, urine, and Viagra® to embed the body’s traces into its own unavailing chemical simulation. His sculptures, both scatological and alchemical, are an integral part of de Quillacq’s durational performance, which begins in the studio and realigns itself with each new showcase. An understanding of “fragmentation,” in the sense of these works, echoes the notion that the self is an accumulation of experiences and interactions with the world, rather than a fixed, cohesive entity. The proliferating artist-body is orchestrated and reconfigured throughout his exhibitions, with the sculptures entering altered constellations at each occasion, interlacing with their surroundings through a choreography of appropriation and rejection:
“[...]my body loses a little of its contours to be able to absorb those of others, which amounts to wanting to occur and reproduce itself, by incorporating others by aggregate, and appropriating its entire filiation.”4
Akin to bodily figurations across David Cronenberg’s cinema, where libidinal energy is often rerouted through technological violence, de Quillacq’s extended physical structure develops new orifices or properties to engage in physical relations with their surroundings. The supple, temperate and still-governable epoxy resin, the substance from which de Quillacq’s constellations first emerge, does not function simply as a sculptural medium. A site of bodily engagement, it is the carrier of an intimate rapport between artist and artwork. The creative activity tying the two actors in the workshop creates a point of indistinction between “the work of desire and the work of production.”5 Art-making collapses into a prolific erotics of touch, the artist’s own body seeping into the materiality of the work as part of an autoerotic praxis. As “psychic matter,” the epoxy retains not only shape but affect. Carrying the traces of de Quillacq’s bodily expenditure, its material condition is modified and charged with the double valence of something being wasted. French philosopher Georges Bataille describes the fundamental meaning of eroticism as “assenting to life even in death,”6 a moment where the discontinuous individual dissolves into a state of continuity. Perched between the mortuary and commemorative relics, the figures of A real boy appear to enact the Bataillean movement: a body that undoes itself in the process of becoming-other.
In Cronenberg’s erotic thriller Crash, a piece of media that de Quillacq cites as having greatly inspired his practice,7 the premeditated near-death experience of the car crash yields a critical point of contact. The 1996 picture follows a group of symphorophiliacs aroused by the involvement in and witnessing of automobile accidents. The human body and the machine (both injured) engage in an erotic transfer of information, technology actively reshaping the anthropomorphic form. “The really unsettling feature of sex in Cronenberg’s films,” Peter Ludlow writes, “is that he shows that it is ubiquitous and that it is a process by which we become something else. Humans are not fixed creatures. We have no essence. Sex is a system by which we recombine into something new.”8 In repeated shots throughout Crash, chromed car exteriors are stroked with reverence and arousal like lustrous epidermides, their hoods absorbing the protagonists’ touch. A polished orthopedic brace encases the reconstructed legs of character Gabrielle (portrayed by Rosanna Arquette) as she suggestively bends over to inspect a black sports convertible in the over-lit showroom of a car dealership; a pronounced, hypertrophic scar bisects the thigh beneath a taut fishnet stocking, its puckered edges recalling the contours of labial tissue. In this emblematic frame, Cronenberg positions Gabrielle’s disabled body as both object of erotic fixation and node in a machinic assemblage. Her bilateral leg braces, here, feature less as a medical apparatus than an architecture through which trauma is eroticised. Within these filmic sequences, the auto-mobile (both as vehicle and as programmatic prefix), anchors a logic of auto-engendering propelled by Freudian death drive, where repetition, impact, and machinic fusion collapse the boundary between (re-)creation and self-destruction.
Like the protagonists of Crash, de Quillacq’s sculptural body echoes the notion of eroticism as a dissolution of selfhood, refusing closure and exposing the afterimage of an osmotic intimate encounter. On a molecular scale, the artist reflects on this dynamic in the 2019 Shower gels washer fluids: Axe “Collision” shower gel (leather and cookies scent) and Carglass washing liquid are poured in an open glass tank and left to co-opt each other. Bodily care merging with industrial maintenance, the work reads like a Cronenbergian experiment in vehicle-macho-cross-contamination, its visually penetrable glass container evoking the exhibitionistic tendencies of Crash’s car-crash fetishists.
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, A Real Boy, installation view, Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2024. Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
Softness Against the System? Viagra®, Sweat, and the Affective Chemistry of Late Capitalism
Concurrently, the ethics of de Quillacq’s workshop appear to seep into the figuration of his pieces. Where the Winckelmannian ideal of classical sculpture, represented in the collection of the Chapelle, imagines the body’s surface as impermeable and stern, de Quillacq's work unsettles this stability. In his practice, the notion of a soft sculpture moves beyond aesthetics into a critique of the late capitalist logic of the body. With hardness equating productivity, the body’s softness has historically been either commodified or pathologized. In Bataille’s conception of his “general economy,” the living organism is ascribed an inherent excess; a “surplus” of energy evinced by life’s chemical reactions. While this abundance can be spent productively, as investment into an organism’s growth, it can be lavishly expended, poured into luxury, a specific form of which Bataille identifies as eroticism.
By engaging with non-productive “shares” that are excluded from the productive economy or resist its logic, de Quillacq’s sculptural practice takes up this threshold, but reconfigures it through the lens of pharmacological intervention. The artist’s use of sweat, urine, semen, Viagra®, and nicotine (some of these materials emulsified into the polymer matrix during the chemical mixing process, others introduced through masturbatory engagement while creating a mold of de Quillacq’s own anatomy),10 foregrounds the body as a chemical economy, something altered and regulated by consumptive and addictive circuits. In his autotheoretical work Testo Junkie (2008), Paul B. Preciado provocatively suggests that in post-Fordist capitalism, the foundational sectors are no longer merely industrial or informational, but pharmacological, pornographic, and militarized, extracting value from “excitation, erection, ejaculation,”11 and the psychic states of pleasure, omnipotence, and destruction. From this perspective, the materials coursing through de Quillacq’s works are not incidental, but constitute the very raw matter of contemporary production.12 In line with Preciado’s notion of the “pharmapornographic regime,”13 defined as a biopolitical system in which power is exerted through the modulation of bodies and subjectivities by way of pharmaceutical, hormonal, and pornographic technologies, controlling sex, identity, and affect by means of a market-integrated circuit of self-regulation, de Quillaq’s processive sculptures visualize a pharmaceutical-pornographic apparatus of control that has permeated the individual’s body.14 Borrowing visceral materiality from the likes of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Cronenberg, de Quillacq’s work, mirroring an intoxicating loss of autonomy, becomes a reflection on what Mark Fisher describes as the “affective regime of late capitalism [...] in which agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.”15 Contemplating the sculptures at the moment of their genesis, in their rudimentary, alchemical stratum, the works illustrate the velocity of “pharmapornographic”16 desire through the chemically mediated flux of masculinity, addiction, and sexual consumption.
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Jeans, 2020. Fiberglass, jeans, sneakers, socks, 31 × 52 × 39 cm. Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
From Caress to Cache
The artist’s work with fiberglass, a material constituting the structural core of most high-speed internet circuits and radio antennas, reinforces the Cronenbergian notion of desire as data exchange as integral to de Quillaq’s synthesis of material and formal concerns. Incorporating such a conduit of accelerated transmission suggests a body rendered not as a coherent form but merely a channel through which stimuli, substances, and desires circulate at uncontrolled speeds, underscoring the paradox of hyperconnectivity and hollowness manifested in each sculpture. As such, de Quillacq’s nicotine and Viagra® might read as a counterexample to Joseph Beuys’ use of honey; the former signifying nourishment, harvested from an instinctive, self-sustaining production cycle, the latter tracing the body’s reliance on substances and synthetic pleasure. Held in a comatose state of being both emptied and over-stimulated, the hollowed condition of his sculptural molds, namely Jeans (2020), formally mirrors this double-gesture of charge and depletion. The work, with its emptiness scantily concealed by rough-and-ready stuffing, materializes the sequence of caress and withdrawal inherent to the molding process, as the intimate act of encasement in the balmy composite is immediately succeeded by a hardened, formal negation of the body. From this, one might then infer that the fiberglass casts “cache” the artist’s desire like surplus data, and that de Quillacq’s sculptures, rather than operating as representations of bodies, simply stage their archives as residual sites of erotic investment. Yet, this also complicates the gesture of bodily dissolution first enacted through the masturbatory impulse. What begins as intimate rupture and a leaking or breaking down of form is rechanneled through petroleum-based polymers that recall the infrastructures of signal, speed, and control. Here, the indistinction between “the work of desire and the work of production”17 becomes a crucial reference point, interlinking sensual, formal, and material conditions.
Pipe Dreams and Mimetic Misfires
The less anthropomorphic works of A real boy interface between industrial structures and organic conduits, evoking both intestinal pathways and mechanical systems, while employing the hardest, most processable materials. They mark a turn from figural disfiguration toward a machinic lexicon that remains obstinately unassimilated. The serpentine form of Bread or Cigarettes (2012), a sleek, ink-blue epoxy pipe, coils into a rotund pedestal, while Philippa (2017–2019), its fleshy, four-meter hyperbole, appears less like a graceful curve and more like a crooked, perforated structure punctured by its own instability. A rendering of Not the Reproduction of Something I Experienced Myself (2011)—a tubular body with a fractured segment tightly bound to it by a thin cord, as if desperately holding itself together against disintegration—articulates the shared condition of structural consumption. These works navigate between two economies of the body: on one side a strategically malfunctional mimicry of industrial processability and readiness for circulation, on the other an inertia that resists function, reflecting exhaustion rather than endurance.
Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Bread or Cigarettes, 2012. BIC blue ink blown on epoxy, 192 × 38 × 12 cm, unique. Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
This observation further challenges the character of the ‘extension’, which is inherent to de Quillacq’s work in toto. In much of body-technology fetishism in contemporary art, the extension or supplement operates as a prosthesis, an addition that augments or stabilizes the human body through mechanical limbs and other wearable appendages. Whereas the tubular, intestinal-like structures in works such as Not the Reproduction of Something I Experienced Myself, Philippa, and Bread or Cigarettes formally resemble industrial piping, they resist becoming functional conduits, instead, suggesting a corporeal system that has lost its coherence. Each propped upon a sizable block of polystyrene and asserting their spectacularized visibility through elevation and a glossy sheen, the three works are arranged as if prepared for visual consumption in their reference to museum pedestals. Likewise, Jeans, an imprint of the artist’s lower body, stuffed with dirty undergarments and sneakers, reverses the paradigm of extension as growth, offering instead an image of stagnation and accumulation. Devoid of organs, Jeans refuses the closed circuits of bodily function, leaving the lower extremity in a state of discard. The ‘system’ of the extended body, here, unsettles a fetishistic schema that, whether through the surrealist object or the technological apparatus, often positions the supplement as a stabilizing force, a way to redirect desire, anxiety, or loss into a containable form. By deploying the substances that preserve our seamless functioning into bodies that remain inanimate, the artist does not create a posthuman enhancement of his sculptures but reveals and exhibits chemical, economic, and industrial dependencies.
Auto-Engendering Imperatives Between Sovereignty and Stasis
This refusal to treat extension as augmentation or repair points instead to de Quillacq’s broader sculptural logic: one of ongoing extraction. The oozing hyper-materiality of his works stands in stark formal contrast to the sculptural tradition enshrined in the Petits-Augustins, meant to extend the lifespan of bodies proposing antique and Renaissance ideals. In the work’s eagerness for a voluntary, transgressive undoing of the self-contained subject in pursuit of continuity, A real Boy stages a perverse economy of transformation that, at first glance, echoes Georges Bataille’s concept of eroticism as a sovereign expenditure. De Quillacq’s plasticized continuum, however, rather than mystical or redemptive, is rendered in the material register of techno-eroticism, creating hybrid, chemically contaminated zones, as bodily coherence is breached not through the artist’s self-inflicted “petite morte,” but through pharmacological saturation and synthetic mutation. De Quillacq’s works take shape at this intersection. Where semen and sweat are fused into epoxy resin and fiberglass, the soft sculpture hardens—disclosing precisely why de Quillacq’s gesture does not, and perhaps cannot, remain sovereign. His materials seal the potential interval: What Bataille envisioned as erotic rupture is recoded as a chemically delimited simulation of transgression, fixed through impermeable finish and primed for institutional display. Instead of affirming the body’s passage into continuity, the resin-coated limbs and tubes, frozen at the moment of disintegration, arrest its unmaking into a synthetic stasis. As the defective is presented in a museal manner, we are not only witnessing a curatorial gesture of aesthetic anxiety management, but are made aware of the desire to assign value to de Quillacq’s works. In an effort to stabilize the abject form, they are transposed into object-realities, their epoxied surface engaging with the fetishistic allure of the commodity-sign.
In these assemblages, we are met with a reflection of a broader condition faced by artists working under late capitalism. De Quillacq’s work, grounded in the desire to constantly produce and reproduce oneself, even as that very process leads to structural depletion, mirrors this tension between the desire for “self-engendering” (auto-engendrement) and the relentless extraction demanded by the systems that commodify artistic labor. Within the framework of galleries, residencies, and institutional cycles, the artist’s presence, body, and labor, subjected to continuous extraction within the market-driven art world, are increasingly mediated through an economy of visibility that thrives on circulation but rarely permits sustained embodiment or rest. In its initial gesture, the artist’s deployment of bodily waste challenges the representational and symbolic fixity on which both museal and market authorities rely, staging his own self-erasure and positioning the artist as an exhaustible resource.
This, however, is destabilized by the embedding of these substances into synthetic, petroleum-based resins. Beyond signaling capitalism’s capacity to metabolize its own critique, de Quillacq’s materials participate in the broader logic of petro-masculinity: a gendered understanding of extraction economics, where commodification and hardening serve as defenses against vulnerability. The very act of casting, molding, pressing, and inscribing bodily fluids into plastic, here, becomes an attempt to sustain presence within a system that fetishizes even the inoperative remnants of its expenditure, while also making them available to the market through the form of the art object. While de Quillacq’s gesture courts erotic, material, and formal transgression, it remains ultimately restricted by the very structures it seeks to unravel: the economic logics of circulation, the hardened aesthetics of petro-masculinity, and the demand for visibility as a precondition of critique. It is, perhaps, a self-aware impasse; one that reveals how even gestures of dissolution risk being cast into form. Consonant with the fetishists in Cronenberg’s Crash, whose desire is structured around the calculated elicitation of impact, de Quillacq’s work understands failure as structural inevitability, not accident. This makes the artist’s proposition neither pure negation nor stable critique. Instead inhabiting the reflexive entanglements of institutional and libidinal desire, structured by economies of self-expenditure and capitalist recuperation, it liberates a heterogeneous reading through a sustained, materially grounded critique of form and medium. Amid the bustle of Paris’s art fairs, de Quillacq’s intervention stands apart, offering a stark reminder that the contemporary artist-body operates within a different kind of temporal economy. One shaped less by preservation and more by continuous exhaustive cycles and ambivalent production.
Johanna Siegler is a writer and researcher based between Berlin and Constance. Informed by queer feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theory, her work focuses on sculptural and post-conceptual practices that engage aesthetic negativity and the optics of failure as critical operations, interrogating dominant systems of authorship, institutional visibility, and cultural value. She currently completes a BA in art history, philosophy, and cultural studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. When not writing, she restores old furniture.
1 Bernard Schulz, “The very first Monuments Man,” in: The Art Newspaper, 20. December 2016. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2016/12/20/the-very-first-monuments-man.
2 Jean-Charles de Quillacq and Elsa Vettier, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps (Sombres Torrents, 2019), 40.
3 De Quillacq and Vettier, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, 41. Translated from French by the author, Johanna Siegler.
4 De Quillacq and Vettier, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, 40. Translated from French by the author, Johanna Siegler.
5 Ibid. “L’activité que j’ai avec l’époxy à l’atelier crée un point d’indistinction entre le travail du désir et le travail de la production.” Translated from French by the author, Johanna Siegler.
6 Georges Bataille, Erotism, Death and Sensuality (Walker and Company, 1996), 23.
7 Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Elsa Vettier: Saint-Pierre-des-corps, 2019, 32–33.
8 Peter Ludlow, The Philosophy of David Cronenberg (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 48.
9 Bataille, Erotism, Death and Sensuality, 32–33.
10 De Quillacq and Vettier, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, 26-27. De Quillacq describes his relationship to epoxy resin as sexual, an interaction involving masturbation
11 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), 39.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 23.
14 Ibid., 23–54.
15 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books, 2009), 73. This is said in the context of Fisher’s discussion of the ‘hedonic models’ he locates within our society.
16 In reference to the term coined by Paul B. Preciado in Testo Junkie (2008).
17 De Quillacq and Vettier, Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, 40. Translated from French by the author, Johanna Siegler.