Magali Reus. Off Script

Jonathan P. Watts

After finishing a meal one day the artist Magali Reus looked down at her plate to find the fine remaining curlicues of red cabbage spelled out a word: ‘england’. Formed by impersonal forces – like the throw of a dice or the portentous remains of tea leaves at the bottom of a cup – it seemed full of significance.

Two years later Reus returned to red cabbage, dissecting its lobed and wavey head to release typographical symbols and punctuation to form her custom typeface ‘KOOL’ (2024). Handpainted on the walls of Museo del Novecento in large-scale graphic vectorised shapes, a sentence-like script in the KOOL typeface loops the gallery’s perimeter. Near-inscrutable, the slivers flicker between semantic meaning and pure image: against this script Reus’ six Clementine works enter into dialogue with one another.

Increasingly, Reus’ work has explored the historically complex and entangled relations between humans and food production, finding in single food items, such as the humble jar of Bonne Maman fruit preserve or the artisanal French baguette, global logistics networks of production, distribution, and financial markets. These largely invisible forces conspire to produce pervasive images and affects of food aesthetics and associations.

This is also the domain of art’s history. Reus’ recent works have explored the image and symbolism of fruit bowls, jars and containers as still-life vessels of aesthetic, art historical, and sociological meaning. Modelled on the French multi-national Bonne Maman preserve jar, the La Fermière yoghurt pot and the Belgian mustard jar Reus’ Clementines series consists of singular larger-than-life renderings bearing what the artist refers to as a ‘domestic graffiti’ that speaks to repurposing: handwritten scribbles and notations; labels of all kinds stuck on their glassy sides; annotations of dates, names, contents, locations and decorations. A preserve stills life.

Clementines actively protrude from the gallery walls, distorted lenses onto narratives of the global and personal: the jars’ familiar designs evoke generic nostalgic homeliness – the preserve of an elderly grandmother’s jam making – while containing miniature mise-en-scènes of domestic customisation and consumption. Lids variably operate as clock-faces, thermostats, weather forecasts, and include references to locations within the domestic sphere as well as the global. Change is marked by references to seasonal, cyclical, past and future times. Each of these jars include personal references from Reus’ past.

Visible inside Clementine (Out of Orbit) is a misleadingly convincing polyester resin rendering of a replica strawberry jam. Strawberry-flavoured jelly is highly saccharine in substance and in all its appeal remains highly abstracted from the fruit’s original flavour. The jar’s label is rendered in folded, laser cut, powder-coated and airbrushed aluminium and based on an actual jar of compote Reus purchased at a local French market in her mother’s town in the Berry, France. Reus acquired it from an elderly woman who was re-purposing old jars to sell her own homemade jellies.

The lid atop this particular jar features an airbrushed depiction of the map of France with protruding welded dots to indicate major cities. Dates of a calendar rendered in layers step in and out of its face. The work is full of personal anecdotal references. A slim laser cut, powder-coated and airbrushed aluminium label acts as a seal that has been picked open. It is based on one Reus found in her mother’s house amid her collection of washed preserve jars stored away in her basement for reuse in her own private jelly making or for DIY tasks around the house. The writing on the Clementine (Out of Orbit)label derives from Reus’ French grandmother’s recipe book which lovingly features all her favourite recipes.

Magali Reus’ sculptural practice is celebrated for the way it combines industrial and craft production materials and processes to productively subvert standardised fabrication chronologies and practices. Charismatic and evasive, at once oblique and effusive, her sculpture advances a compelling open-ended symbolism and visual language. To go ‘off script’ is to cease conforming to expectations of behaviour or events. It is an idiom that figures reality as a text that carefully stages mannered public presentation.

To go ‘off script’, then, is to move from a familiar system of communication towards something unguarded, tentative and emotional. Often experienced as some profound, deeper truth, to go off script, of course, has become a political rhetoric of honesty. To what extent is the handmade a rhetoric of corporate honesty? Reus’ misbehaving vessels seek out new, more individualised relationships to a prescribed corporate form by presenting the handmade as ultra-processed and refashioning the ultra-processed in a more artisanal hand wrought guise.