Inspired by black metal, his art was the toast of the 00s. But the former tattooist flamed out. Now he’s returning – with 14 fallen chandeliers that speak of opiated excess
If Christmas is the season for excess, then Banks Violette has made the perfect decorations. The artist has created 14 chandeliers out of industrial white fluorescent tubing and put each one in a different flagship branch of Celine, the French fashion house. A handful are suspended from the ceilings and look pristine but the rest are smashed and collapsed – one third vertically, another horizontally – and slump on the floor.
They are self-portraits of a sort, Violette tells me. “It’s in there,” he says over the phone from his house in Ithaca, Upstate New York, “this thing collapsing in a corner and passing out.” He says that he responds to sculptures that in some way also relate to the human body, such as Alberto Giacometti’s macabre 1932 work Woman with Her Throat Cut, an eviscerated body that looks like a mantrap. Another inspiration was the German artist Martin Kippenberger’s street lamps for drunks, where the poles are so bent over that the light is almost in the gutter, or the posts wave crazily around the pavement.
