Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan defined the ‘Objet petit a’ as that which crystallizes our deepest desire, that “dark object of desire”—to paraphrase Buñuel—which is nothing more than the cause or main goal of our fantasies. Today, this ‘objet a’ takes on many faces, answers to many names, and is constructed by visual discourses, advertising fables, and invisible algorithms that make it more of a product imposed by the system than a truly personal longing.

"Objet a. Drifts of Capitalist Desire" reflects on how desire is constructed, directed, and utilized in late capitalism, transforming it into a product of control and consumption.

What do we really want? What should we desire? How should we desire? Instagram reels, self-help books, and dating apps hack our ego, instantly turning it into a profitable and malleable product.

The exhibition does not seek to offer answers, nor does it pursue an unlikely normative alternative. But it does aim to question what Lacan defined as “the desire of the Other”; to make us more aware of a certain contemporary bovarism, of the traps and tricks employed today by mimetic desire—as René Girard would say—to convince us of our aspirations. In this sense, many of the works presented play with the uncertain ambiguity of a liberation that perhaps isn't so liberating.

We see this, for example, in the visual saturation of the installation "Yo soy, tú soy, ella/él soy" by Beatriz Dubois, in which the artist questions the grammar of images that flood our social networks and serve to project identities and fantasize about different lives. The same occurs with Gloria López Cleries’s video, which reclaims the codes of ASMR—a practice originally intended for relaxation in contexts of hyperstimulation—to subvert or at least redirect them. Paradoxically, in one of these sessions, the artist reflects on the role of emotions and the imposition of happiness within the market economy.

Mark Fisher referred to this right to happiness—which today turns into a happiness dictatorship (a source of a depressive society)—as depressive hedonia. An exponential overexploitation of desire finds its counterpoint in all these praises of laziness, advocacy for degrowth, the “society of fatigue,” and returns to a contemplative life that so many current thinkers talk about. A new model that imagines new worldviews, a return to sensory and dreamlike intimacy—seen as well in the luminous bodies of Julia Creuheras, where the transparency of the cushions opens the door to a narrative of material indeterminacy and emotional hesitation, or in the raw oxymoron (be tender motherfucker) and the insatiable words of Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo’s sound piece.

Paradoxes of desire and unstable figures are discovered in the phrases and intertwined bodies of Joan Pallé: a deconstruction of how non-monogamous relationships are represented in popular audiovisual culture, especially in film and television. More specifically in The Idiots by Lars Von Trier and the curious Lions Love by Agnès Varda, two films where the fantasy of total sexual liberation reveals its limitations. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the full title of Varda’s film is Lions Love (... and Lies).)

The same fruitful and open oscillation can be found in the paintings of Sara Bonache and Marcel Rubio Juliana. Bonache offers new ways of approaching the world, seeking in natural references a way to expand the spectrum of sensory and vibrational interactions. By playing with formal and chromatic stereotypes inherited from a certain gaze, she explores the hybrid aspect of any existence and advocates for a “regime of mutual affectation,” as she puts it—one far removed from contemporary control and domination.

This attempt to formulate new possible figures within this libidinal economy—detached from efficiency and usefulness—also appears in Marcel Rubio Juliana’s ironic and subversive triptych. Depicting what he calls a society of “unbalanced desire,” the artist uses three figures and scenes from classical culture (Orlando, Dido, and Poliphilo) to denounce contemporary immediacy and superficiality. He does so by referencing medieval texts and using a style that ironically blends contemporary pixelation, Renaissance perspective, impeccable technique, and a vindication of an ideal of romantic love that underlies many of today’s dilemmas.

Through the narrative of a dictatorial individuality and the constant reinvention of possibilities, contemporary capitalism seems to keep us in an eternal position of never-satisfied consumers. Consumers of objects, consumers of bodies, consumers of experiences, of pleasure, of culture—our desires have become products with which we are constantly fattened, the categorical criterion of any political and personal evaluation.

Perhaps the liberation of our desire must come with a reworking of its form and scope—reinvented figures of tenderness, fragile sensitivities, poetic vulnerabilities, or more demanding fictions, as seen in the works presented in the exhibition. Perhaps we must realize that the commercialization of a desiring self cannot be the healthy political horizon of a society.

By Aurélien Le Genissel