Price-less retail therapy in Brussels

Sex sells. Fact. So much so that strolling down Merchants Street a few weeks ago a bright red light display glowed vehemently in a shop window reading precisely so... actually it said more in smaller print which we need not reproduce here anyway.

Alas, it is gone. I wonder why? Perhaps too offensive? Never mind. All I can say is that it was hard to miss, or go unnoticed.

So when I received an e-mail titled Dirty Painting from Ruth Bianco, I knew something good and fun was a-coming. I was not disappointed.

Ms Bianco is currently showing a series of works at La Boutique Soho, Place Stéphanie, Brussels. Titled Dirty Painting And Other Works... The body of work shown in this exhibition comprises elements from three separate projects: Dirty Painting is the title of a collection of collage works on paper created specifically within the context of London's red light district, Soho; The Dead Famous tagwork series, explores the phenomenon of celebrity and the iconographic cliché of desire, while also highlighting the powerful seduction exposed through mass sales and consumption; and Celluloid Censor which is an ongoing project where Ms Bianco uses the frame by frame inspiration of movie making to compile a body of work to be called Drawing From Movies.

She tells me that she approached Riccardo Chieruzzi, La Boutique Soho's Italian owner, when she found out that he liked holding art-related events in the store "to interact with fashion... then a year ago he invited me to work on an idea. He was extremely excited about the Dirty Painting intervention... it was the first to respond so specifically to the shop's reference and Soho's underground world".

After viewing Ms Bianco's Mile of Paper intervention in 2008 which interacted directly with the permanent exhibits in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta, I asked her whether she had ever undertaken a project which combined art and fashion in a retail outlet.

"It's the first time I've created a project like this... I took it on because I was attracted to the provocation of art placed in the obvious commercial context of a trendy fashion boutique like Soho situated right in the heart of Brussels' fashionable high street shops... and I liked playing with and turning that very context around.

"Part of the success of a work is its contextualisation and how you work and transform certain elements to create a holistic sense of experience in a space... when I take on a site it becomes an exercise of carefully considered interrelational feelings, meanings and conceptual links...

"No less with this current space. I created this body of work with the context of this Brussels shop in mind, conceptualising the consumptive industry of the fashion world and combining it with the raunchy iconography of the sex industry of its namesake Soho - the seduction of the sex and fashion industries are dynamic elements that give to a metropolis its urban commodification and pulse. Apart from this I work intuitively with the physical space and objects I find on site... in this case I fell upon five mannequins in the store which I used as a sculptural echo of one of my naughty images, while generally responding to the industrial look of the shop's interior in the installation design for my work."

Although Brussels might not be that far, and the Maltese community there might be fairly abundant, it is not exactly your shop around the corner to visit in between errands. So I wonder whether Ms Bianco would consider bringing this show to Malta, especially bearing in mind the hullaballoo caused last year due to another artist's conjoining of art, pornography and politics (or politicians to be specific): "I may show some of this work in Malta eventually in the right environment and temperament.

I cannot quite see why it should be met with resistance, though recent reaction and appalling taboo never seize to surprise. My work engages tongue-in-cheek hints to the current hot issues of censorship in Malta.

This double-take plays on the fact that censoring under the guise of 'protection' often generates a more illicit market. So, I feel, on my own initiative, I took a message to 'Brussels' that as a society we are not all 50 years behind the rest of Europe in the way we censor artistic expression."

Ms Bianco relates how Liza Minelli's song and lyrics "money makes the world go round, the world go round..." from Cabaret inspired her. "I translate these words into my own visual language to express how 'sex, art and celebrity make the world go round!' The conceptual thread running through my exhibition relates to the commodification of the image; the way this is consumed and the cliché of desire. Part of the visual semiology I use linking the works together is created through the ubiquitous price tag... which of course is price-less! The tag, therefore, stands as a symbol of promise, the panacea for fulfilment sought in a world of exchange."

All in all, Ms Bianco's work proves a very important point... That art need not be "beautiful" or pertain to conventional aesthetics for it to be relevant or for one to derive pleasure from it. Ms Bianco's work is powerful in more ways than one and it touches directly on a "hot" topic which has been the subject of much debate in longer than I care to remember.

Such debate is nevertheless conducive to growth and whether we like it (or accept it) or not, it also defines who we are, so we might as well embrace it.

www.ruthbianco.com

• Dirty Painting And Other Works is on show at Le Boutique, Place Stéphanie, Brussels till April 7.