(after Cattelan)
In his work with Maurizio Cattelan, the artist invited Aldridge to respond to his retrospective exhibition in Paris by allowing him to shoot his own responses to Cattelan's work after the museum closed at night. The phenomenal images to emerge from Aldridge's night at the museum must be witnessed at first hand. (After Cattelan): proposes instantly compelling narratives–and most invitingly, several different narratives, potentially, simultaneously. It is as though each image can be comprised of various distinct and individual stories–just as Marcel Proust referred to himself as 'the many gentleman of whom I am comprised.' The iconography of historic and moral meaning, of good and evil, becomes an absurdist boudoir. The image exemplifies postmodern Romanticism, and the reclamation of romantic irony – the palette of a neo-Gothic fantasy: an urgent and persistent need for spectacle and sensation, ritual, the bizarre, unhinged and uncanny, disruption, heightened style, games seduction, exaggerated emotion, fear, poetry, elegy, wonder, perversity, awe, violence, irreverence, myth, voyeurism, intellectual imagination and wit, the beckoning unknown and unknowable–in the fact of technology and time, the world shrunk and the universe explained.
