On the occasion of this new edition of Art-O-Rama, DS Galerie is pleased to present “OUR PAIN™ NOW AVAILABLE IN XXL”, an unprecedented project by Antoine Conde (1997, France), conceived as a fragmented billboard—a composite visual space where the image sheds all immediacy. This proposal, created specifically for the fair, continues his collaboration with DS Galerie and follows his solo exhibition presented in March 2025.

The gallery extends its reflection on the commercial architecture of the exhibition booth, taking full advantage of the open-plan layout at Art-O-Rama. The booth is no longer simply a display space but a field for both artistic and theoretical experimentation. Echoing the ideas of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown & Izenour, 1972), which celebrate vernacular forms and the excesses of postmodern signage, the stand transforms into décor, surface, and fiction. It is no longer about use but about staging, subverting, and exposing it as a symbolic structure at the crossroads of the ephemeral, the poster, and narrative.

For Antoine Conde, the booth becomes both exhibition space and overflow. Drawing freely from advertising imagery, poster formats, and montage aesthetics, he subverts the codes of the billboard to create a composite landscape saturated with images, narratives, and contradictory signals. Contrary to expected visual efficiency, the artist offers a slowed, intimate reading where the image does not impose itself but is traversed like a fragmented story to be pieced together.

Advertisements sourced from magazines, pop and popular imagery, gay pornography, or documentaries—each fragment is torn from an iconosphere saturated with desire, self-exposure, and the staging of bodies and affects. Here, the advertising poster becomes an unstable, emotional, porous surface where each image functions not as a message but as a floating clue within a dense, almost labyrinthine composition.

In capital letters across the billboard, the slogan “OUR PAIN™ NOW AVAILABLE IN XXL” detonates. It plays on the ambiguity of commercial language applied to the experience of pain, ironicizing the commodification of our personal and collective narratives, stamped with a “™” that is both cynical and lucid. This small symbol freezes experience, standardizes it, sealing the dispossession of the intimate. The “XXL” evokes the aesthetics of pornography, the culture of excess, and the oversized scale of contemporary discourse. Everything is big—too big—even to the point of pain. The gesture speaks volumes: trauma is public, coded, capitalized, but also shared, assumed, and exposed.

Drawing, for Antoine Conde, overflows. It is not a smooth surface but an unstable terrain, crossed, scratched, and crossed out: the image is parasitized by language, inhabited by writing. The support seems vandalized, alive, traversed by the artist’s voice. Writing, far from captioning the image, infiltrates it. It becomes affect, disjointed syntax, and discontinuous narrative—a way of expressing, or of not being able to express everything.

The installation presents itself as a coherent whole: a large image designed for the billboard format but capable of disassembling, fragmenting at any moment. Each drawing can be removed, isolated, or relocated; each sheet has its own narrative, its own title, its own voice. These are autonomous units, never closed in on themselves. Together, they form an affective puzzle, a shifting cartography where each fragment contains a trace of the whole without ever exhausting it. This modular logic echoes that of the booth itself: an open, unstable, porous structure where nothing is fixed. Like our identities—composite, fragmented, recomposable—the work rejects imposed unity in favor of multiple possible narratives.

The booth thus becomes the support for a diffracted subjectivity, simultaneously hyper-exposed and resistant, vulnerable yet structured, caught in the excess of images and the loss of meaning. In this sea of images, where the wreckage is as emotional as it is symbolic, a raft emerges on the horizon: “Le Radeau de la Méduse.” Here, the billboard capsizes—and with it, the floating narratives of our identities, desires, and shared pains.

Text by | Thomas Havet