Curated by Oli Epp

Oli EPP, Harrison PEARCE, Tammi CAMPBELL, Frank BRECHTER, Matthew HANSEL, Devan SHIMOYAMA, Ben SPIERS, Salomé CHATRIOT, Maja DJORDJEVIC, Ally ROSENBERG, Liao WEN, Ry David BRADLEY, Sally KINDBERG, Cary KWOK, Simon LINKE, Marius STEIGER, Christopher HARTMANN, Cornelia BALTES, Alison JACKSON

Perrotin presents Clear History, a group exhibition of international artists curated by artist Oli Epp that stages a visual conversation between digital erasure and material permanence, authenticity and artifice, taboo and prestige.

The term “Clear History” is part of a broader lexicon of web vernacular and evokes our daily digital rituals. Terms like “The Cloud”, “Hot Spot”, “Portal”, and “Window” conjure visions of ethereal lightness and technological transcendence. These words promise transparency and transformation, even as they mask the weight of their physical infrastructure. “Clear” becomes both verb and adjective–suggesting obstruction and visibility.

Yet history resists such ethereal treatment–it’s messy, woven with contradictions and half-truths that refuse to be cleared with a simple click. In an era where technology promises to edit, revise, and reinvent our past into something as thin as a screen, these artworks reveal what lies beneath our attempts at erasure. They record, reinvent, and freeze moments with one eye on the past and another squinting toward an uncertain future.

Intimately versed in both the effervescent and constraining dynamics of the contemporary art world, Epp composed a show that balances conceptual fluidity with formal rigor. The result is an environment where physicality reasserts itself–dripping, popping, crunching, and fogging up our glasses–while subtly addressing the immaterial currents that shape our contemporary experience.

Cornelia Baltes initiates this material dialogue through works that hover between abstraction and recognition. Her playful compositions suggest bodily forms–torsos, eyes, breasts–through bold color fields that create afterimages in our vision, like optical imprints that persist even after we look away. These seemingly simple forms, rendered with precisely controlled pigments that alternately mask and reveal the raw canvas, echo the exhibition’s central theme: the impossibility of complete erasure, where each attempt at clearing away creates its own form of marking.

Sally Kindberg extends this exploration into more satirical territory, her paintings capturing fragments of bodies in velvety iridescent and latex textures that speak to both the polish and absurdity of contemporary life.

These investigations of authenticity and presence find different expression in Maja Djordjevic’s meticulously crafted paintings, which transform pixelated aesthetics into profound investigations of identity.

This interplay between appearance and reality continues in Alison Jackson’s photographs, where orchestrated scenes with political lookalikes probe our inability–or unwillingness–to distinguish truth from fiction in our image-saturated world.

Works like Tammi Campbell’s Elvis add more layers to this exploration of cultural iconography. Viewed through a rippled layer of bubble wrap, the familiar face becomes both protected and distorted. The work creates a temporal collision between past and present, the satisfying snap of packaging material becomes a metaphor for the layers that simultaneously preserve and distort our relationship to images, icons, and memory.

The exhibition’s investigation of presence and absence extends into more visceral territory through works that explore hybrid forms and material transformation. Benjamin Spiers’ contorted figures mark a shift toward more metamorphic visions of the body. His twisted, luminous forms hover between classical sculpture and science fiction, their impossible anatomies suggesting beings who inhabit the threshold between historical reference and hallucinatory futures.

Salomé Chatriot’s cool-surfaced curves present contemporary totems that embody the entanglement of our desires and physical existence.

In Harrison Pearce’s work, a pearl-like orb nests in an ergonomic shelter, evoking the slow transformation of matter into meaning through the reciprocal relationship between organic form and architectural intention.

Liao Wen’s hand-carved elements and Ally Rosenberg’s automotive- finished surfaces contrast their toothy and tentacular forms further probing this dialogue between nature and fabrication.

The exhibition culminates in a dreamscape of familiar forms pushed just beyond recognition, where spectral presences linger in the negative space–trailing laughter, fading warmth, and bright ideas dimmed by time. Like digital artifacts that refuse to be fully deleted, these traces persist, leaving a trail that leads both forward and back.

Christopher Hartmann’s photorealistic paintings embody this ethereal quality through layers of oil paint that mirror digital processes, where contrasts of warm and cool tones play across silken folds of bedsheets, conjuring the warmth of bodies no longer present. These works capture moments suspended in time, each canvas a testament to the capacity to hold contradictory states of being.

In this contemplation of presence and absence, Devan Shimoyama’s monumental multimedia portraits command the space with sensual authority and material abundance. In works like Spray and Stream, he transforms intimate gestures into moments of transcendent beauty through his masterful manipulation of oil, glitter, and crystals, creating portals where desire and transformation collide.

The artists in Clear History speak to each other across mediums and methodologies, their works creating a constellation of responses to our contemporary condition. Like the web vernacular that inspired its title, the exhibition plays with the meaning of transparency and opacity. These works assert their stubborn materiality–they drip, shine, stretch, and transform. Like history itself, they refuse the easy promises of our digital lexicon. Inside every cloud, portal, and window lies a physical world deeply imbricated into our senses. As we resign ourselves to the hallucination, we find ourselves adapting to–even appreciating– the simulation. Yet these works remind us that there is no true separation between virtual and material existence, only an endless cycle of cleaning and marking, where touch and sight, presence and absence, become indistinguishable from one another.

Anitra Lourie, researcher at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne