On the occasion of this new edition of Art-O-Rama, DS Galerie presents “OUR PAIN™ NOW AVAILABLE IN XXL”, a new project by Antoine Conde (1997, France), conceived as a fragmented billboard—a composite visual space where the image sheds all immediacy. Specially conceived for the fair, this proposal extends his collaboration with DS Galerie and follows his solo exhibition presented in March 2025.
Here, the gallery continues its exploration of the commercial architecture of the exhibition booth, seizing the possibilities offered by Art-O-Rama’s open-plan layout. The booth is no longer a mere hanging space, but a terrain for plastic and theoretical experimentation. Echoing the theories of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown & Izenour, 1972), which value the vernacular forms and the excessive signage of postmodern architecture, the booth becomes décor, surface, fiction. It is no longer a matter of using it, but of staging it, diverting it, exhibiting it as a symbolic structure, at the crossroads of the ephemeral, the billboard, and the narrative.

For Antoine Conde, the booth becomes both an exhibition space and a space of overflow. Drawing freely from advertising imagery, the billboard format, and the aesthetics of montage, he subverts the codes of the billboard to create a composite landscape, saturated with images, stories, and contradictory signals.
Contrary to the expected visual efficiency, the artist proposes a slowed-down, intimate reading, where the image does not impose itself but is crossed through, like a fragmented narrative to be pieced together. Advertisements drawn from magazines, from pop and popular imagery, from gay pornography or documentaries: fragments 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 acts not as a message, but as a clue, floating in a dense, almost labyrinthine composition.

In capital letters on 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, and satirises the commodification of our personal and collective stories, stamped with a “™” that is both cynical and clear-sighted. This small symbol freezes the experience, standardises it, seals the dispossession of intimacy. “XXL” summons at once the aesthetics of pornography, the culture of excess, and the hypertrophied scale of contemporary discourse. Everything is big, too big, even pain. This gesture says it all: trauma is public, coded, capitalised, but also shared, assumed, exposed.
For Antoine Conde, drawing overflows. It is not a smooth surface, but an unstable ground, crossed, scribbled over, erased. The image is allowed to be parasitised by language, inhabited by writing. The support seems vandalised, alive, traversed by the artist’s voice. Writing, far from captioning the image, infiltrates it. It becomes affect, dislocated syntax, discontinuous narrative, a way of saying, or of not being able to say everything.

The installation appears as a coherent whole—a large image conceived for the billboard format, yet one that can at any moment be dismantled, fragmented. Each drawing can be removed, isolated, repositioned: each sheet has its own narrative, its own title, its own voice. These are autonomous units, never closed in on themselves. Together, they compose an affective puzzle, a shifting cartography where each fragment contains something of the whole without ever exhausting it. This modular logic mirrors that of the booth itself: an open, unstable, porous structure where nothing is fixed. Like our identities—composite, dislocated, reconfigurable—the work rejects imposed unity in favour of the multiplicity of possible narratives.

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

Text by | Thomas Havet