Dominique Obadia

The first thing you remember of him is his smile. As though he was greeting you in expectation of putting up a big childish prank.

Dominique Obadia was born in Paris in 1949. For the last four years he's found a loyal patron in Claude Samuel whose contemporay arts gallery on 69 avenue Daumesnil near the gare du Lyon is showing his photographs, videos and installations under the title War, Game and Sex.

The game part is presented by deforming toys clad in military uniforms and carrying military hardware. Toys are Barbie dolls, teddy bears, assorted soft toys, transformed to fit his fertile prankster imagination.

Cages with neon signs and the garb of plastic items of war, and an installation of a real-sized flipper wearing pilot whose face is a small video screen showing his funny film The War of Fontainebleau in a loop --- reduce the reality of our war(s) to the realm of surrealism, or rather another reality which might fit into the Oval Office and make some of the neocons rethink their strategy in a humorous way. His masterpiece of the exhibition is what he calls a “War Totem”, an African fetish sculpture covered with nails for ritual purposes he found in Senegal whose form is surrounded by a neon tube and his right fist over his shoulder that normally carries a spear, is holding a green bamboo stick dangling on both ends two toy hand grenades.

Then there are his large sized digital photographs collated on wood or aluminum of figurative representations of toys that all transform the theme of war in the realm of the absurd.

What do you think of the exhibition? He asks. It doesn't shock, I reply, it makes you think and wonder and when he pulls out the front page ripped out the March 3 edition of Le Monde newspaper splattered with a large photograph of a soldier pointing his rifle into the direction of an supposed enemy, the real photograph reveals itself as the total absurdity of our lives, specially when you see the invitation photograph that has a similar image surrounded by toys, a toy hanging off the rifle a soldier is pointing at his imaginary target.

Imagination and fun, pranks and games are perhaps the last resort we have to escape the absurdity of the war(s) around us, at least they produce a sensation of wonder and bewilderment that should be interpreted as the beginning of the end of all wars – even though that might be wishful thinking.