“Everybody is trying to tell you things, trying to tell you where to invest your money, what to eat, what’s healthy, what’s unhealthy, who you should fuck, how you should fuck it,” says Polish-Thai painter Oh de Laval. Her work is a challenge to this incessant pressure to calculate your life according to someone else’s narrative, be it from sex, relationships, technology or politics. “People should live more in the moment and do the things that they desire.”
She’s witnessed firsthand how the mediation of apps into our day-to-day has distanced us from doing that — or perhaps even knowing what we desire at all. In much of her previous work she’s dealt with deviance, raunch and perversions, but also the “stories that you cry about or suffer in a few years that become just a good story that you will laugh about with your friends,” she says, “a weird human thing.”
In her forthcoming Paris solo show, however, she ventures deeper into these messy, unknown elements of desire with which we’ve lost touch.
“My show is related to the hidden part of the things that we don’t say, but we crave so much. There’s so many, I feel like so many people are lonely now — in New York, in Paris and big cities, there’s lots of people but everyone is alone and lonely. They have so much desire, but it’s difficult in this very cold environment to express it.”
Even with these themes in mind, her work is bold, colorful and sexy, layered with fleshy shades of pink, open mouths and mayhem. It mirrors again the attitude Oh de Laval imparts on living: a little suffering is “the price of having fun.”
That everyone who views her work may have a different relationship with these themes is part of the point: whatever you might see or feel is a reflection of your own self. “I feel like every person sees every artwork through themselves, through your experiences and through your life. So for me, my works are not negative. They are not feminists, and they are not anti-feminist, anti-woman, or pro-women or whatever. My friend said that my works are about being a woman in the current world, and that’s how I feel. That’s what I want to transfer to people. There are different women, so they have different experiences.”
