Toy Ploy

Christophe Bourély: Paintings

643 Project Space is pleased to announce Toy Ploy a collaboration of paintings by

Christophe Bourély and digital mixed media by Larry Lytle.

In their second collaboration, Bourély and Lytle use the innocence of children’s toys

combined with sly humor as their subject matter to engage with environmental and social

political issues.

Bourély takes on the problem of toys, specifically shovels used to make sand castles,

abandoned or forgotten at the beaches of the California coastline. As he makes his

morning run down these beaches, Bourély keeps an eye out for the colorful shovels

poking out of the sand. He brings them home to use as his muse, painting them at actual

size, floating in a background of sea and sky divided by a horizon line. The seascape

image could be like any which one might take using a cellphone camera, and which are

taken by Bourély to fit the shape and style of the shovel. The shovel floating in front of

this desirable ocean scene becomes an iconographic symbol of the intersection between

innocent childhood play and the devastating effect of the exploitation and contamination

of this earth.

Lytle uses toy guns that one finds accompanying 12-inch action figures to ask questions

concerning the intersection of advertising to children and the subsequent desire to own

guns in a society where there are more guns than people. Although the guns are fractions

of an inch, to 3 or 4 inches long, they can look amazingly real. Lytle researches

advertising copy from his childhood—written during the “golden age” of midcentury

America and found on the back pages of comic books and inside magazines like Boys’

Life. He selects portions of the ad copy enticing children to own a gun—toy or real—and

alternates it with the few and predictable pro forma admonitions and condolences, which

are mouthed before and after a mass shooting. The toy gun, which is described in the ad

copy, floats over the patterned language of childhood desires and adult impotence.