Every epoch has its luminaries, and in the early 2000s New York art scene, Banks Violette stood out. His work, characterized by its dark and rigorous nature, epitomized the era’s blend of nihilism and celebration. His creations, ranging from broken drum sets to skeletal architectures, illuminated by white fluorescent light and echoing with the subsonic pulse of death metal, captured the spirit of those times.
Hedi Slimane, drawn to this incandescent era, played a dual role as a documentarian and participant. His stark black and white photographs vividly portrayed the intense masculinity and unrestrained freedom of his fellow artists.
In July 2007, Slimane curated “Sweet Bird of Youth” at Arndt & Partner in Berlin, showcasing artists like Dash Snow, Slater Bradley, and Banks Violette. That same year, “Young American” at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam paid photographic homage to this artist generation. After a decade of seclusion, Violette is cautiously re-emerging, his work finding renewed relevance and appearing in galleries and museums, and now in the context of Slimane’s re-envisioned Celine flagship stores.
The synergy between Violette and Slimane is longstanding. Violette admires Slimane’s genuine sincerity and his ability to transform irony into its opposite.
Violette’s chandelier structures for the stores, inspired by minimalist artists like Dan Flavin and Sol Le Witt, represent a deconstructed state of theatrical collapse, embodying both narcotic collapse and revival. These sculptures encapsulate the emotional tenor of those times, blending the poetics of post-traumatic stress with the aesthetics of boredom, further enriched by the intersection of fashion and retail.