SNOWFLAKES
K. Desbouis
September 19 - October 11, 2025
꩜ Imagine a flustered mind, sifting through images of absence. Pale colour worlds of static snowfall on nacreous banks. Monsanto atoms made of fluff, leather-bound cartoon clouds. Everything arrives wrapped in a Vermeer fuzz, and leaves in a Tex Avery cloud of smoke. Thoughts are suspended in action like a Monet snow globe shaken to a thick blizzard. ꩜ Snowflakes are anything but blank; theirs is an art of elaborate blankness, silence filling the void with noise. ꩜ Just as the ‘scent’ of cold expresses an internal truancy, elisions also account for many of art’s more mesmerizing struggles. To think through these, it helps to consider everything à l’envers—as nothing, that is. It takes a while to sort this out. ꩜ What are we trying to look at, when directed by Snowflake POV? Microscopic eyes essaying to see ‘Everything’—in all dimensions, trying to crack through to the surface of the real, concealed. The cataclysm is implied. ꩜ ….cataclysm… ꩜ And still, how hard it is to speak of the subject. For Blanchot, the snow hails concealment, cryptic nothingness, something hidden. As emblem of the indeterminate, one cannot speak of it. Shhh. It silences, coats, veils. ꩜ Two circles collide and something synchronous happens. An afterglow? On one side, there’s the snowball (& what Jason Rhoades had called ‘the racing form’) & on the other a series of atoms. ꩜ “By going between places, it will generate things. It’ll snowball, take on a mythology and a history, and then at some point it’ll just stop. And that’ll be it, it’ll be a finished sculpture.” ꩜ Snow falls over the Alps. On my bedside table is a pristine copy of Amy Gerstler’s 1982 chapbook, Christy’s Alpine Inn; from the first poem: “All this loosened emotion / crunches underfoot like snow.” This moves the mind to a poem by Ed Smith (who dated Amy in the ‘80s) titled, “Untitled”; his poem’s a koan on crunch: Lettuce snow lettuce snow lettuce snow. ꩜ Snow like TV-static, packed snow, lettuce, snow, molecular bonds blown-up and made to collide. Pay attention to the afterglow, warm & fuzzy, irradiating orbs caught seconds from imploding—or, maybe parting. Who can tell. The moment of impact never arrives, always falling, Omnimoving through the air, seeing everything in all directions, suspended in animation. The dilation of the circle: anamorphosis. Snowflakes in a staged slippage of perspective, circles becoming an ellipse. Baroque POV. Something Disney-esque about it. ꩜ The mind crunches on frailty, feelings packed tight, splashed with color like snow-cones. Flavor expresses a valence, the codex of emotion intimates an origin in some kind of atomic chemistry. Kinetics. ꩜ A kind of restraint at stake, here, which concerns a kind of poetic division—a meter, let’s say. I think to the Japanese children’s Debussy: Snowflakes are falling. A fixed form trying to unfix itself, to unbind itself from the bondage of form. The rhythm forms in one elision after the other. (Like writing […] over and over again. Pure static.) ꩜ The indeterminacy. Unsure expressions of self, personae, exaggerated for theatrical effect. The baroque performance of self takes place at surface. Snowflakes snowballing: that is, accumulating, emphasizing, swerving sinuously, gesticulating, maybe testiculating? … Nevermind. ꩜ Each snowball split aspires to become a singular: flake. Atoms expressing a desire to become ‘Other.’ Special, strange, disorienting. Their ratified selves disperse. ꩜ They’re easy to deflate, K tells me. There’s a zipper, or something nifty like that. ꩜ Mallarmé also comes to mind, the Crisis of Verse, the Toast. He mentions, amongst many relevant things in the Salut, this froth, the usual medium for faux-snow. ꩜ N.B.: When Dorothy falls asleep in the poppies, towards the end of the Wizard of Oz, the flakes were made of asbestos. ꩜ In the poet’s mention of froth—or was it foam?—we are meant to hear a nod to the Aphrodite myth. Froths, foams, bubbles and, now, faux-snow, become emblems of poetry’s excess bubbling life into being from the depths. A nutsack gets cut off in divine providence, falling into the ocean, and from the foam that rises, so does the Goddess of Beauty. So, excess, bubbles, poetic expression coming up, allegorical sperm floating to surface. Hello, Seaman! True beauty. ꩜ I have only once seen it snow in Los Angeles. It was at Disneyland, around November, and just as the fireworks were about to begin, and I was about the leave the park, the sky filled with feather-light foam, faux-flakes circulating in slow spirals, as if tracing the air’s circulatory patterns. This would typically be the hour when I escape the park, prior to the parade, the snowfall made me stall, speechless. Tiny flakes in suspended animation, indescribably light, emblems of indeterminacy. Glued to their static, I recalled something Kamau Braithwaite spoke of, namely, the strange paradox of lacking, as a Caribbean native, the ‘syllabic intelligence’ needed to speak about hurricanes, native to his home. Against this lacking capacity to describe the absolutely familiar, the poet felt perfectly at ease in describing “the imported alien experience of the snowfall.” ꩜ To invoke (and invert) the same, perhaps I was stuck speechless then, as I am now, watching K’s faux-snow fall, because it is too close to home. Not just as a Northerner, but, as someone accustomed to staring at the snow of the blank page, confronting the static pastimes of writers, “Staring. Sitting blankly,” as Schuyler once put it, “Watching TV.” Trying to crack through the frost, make thoughts fall, or slip, skate. ꩜ I could bring up Sartre’s strange theory about freedom and skiing, too, but I sense that’s one flake too far. ꩜
WORKS LIST
Snowflakes (America), 2025
Faux fur, leather, metal, fabric
33 x 15 x 33
Terms and Conditions, 2025
Movie snow
Variable dimensions
ARTIST BIOS
K. DESBOUIS
K. Desbouis is a French artist and filmmaker living in Lisbon, Portugal. Selected exhibitions include ECAL (Lausanne, 2025), CAPC (Bordeaux, 2025), Toxi Space (Zürich, 2025), Les Bains-Douches (Alençon 2025), Gaudel de Stampa (Paris, 2024), Treignac Projet (Treignac, 2023), Sentiment (Zurich, Paris, 2022) Futura (Prague, 2021), Parliament (Paris, 2021), Noah Klink (Berlin, 2021), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2020), Crèvecoeur (Paris, Marseille, 2019) - soon at Club Raum (Amsterdam, 2025) and at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2026). Since 2021, he has been the editor of Suckcess; a magazine and a collective work exploring the continually renewed conditions of success, the performance of identity, class systems, and negativity.
https://kdesbouis.com/
Exhibition curated by Inès Kivimäki