CASTLE

- Max Xeno Karnig Orange and blue curtain, 2026 oil on copper panel 5” x 14” @maximilianxeno

- Bod Mellor Solange (Glenda Jackson), 2015 Oil on linen 30” x 24” “The works from the Maids series (2015) presented at CASTLE focus on female characters in domestic roles, drawn from a larger body of paintings that includes other genders. In this selection, a first layer depicts the faces of recognizable actresses - Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, or Sandrine Bonnaire - in the maid roles they have played on screen. These figures emerge from a filmic landscape that has historically overrepresented white female domestic workers, revealing how classed and gendered labor is mediated through cinematic convention. Yet a second layer of paint disrupts this legibility. Thick, often scribbled marks, glitches that sometimes coagulate into ornamental forms such as stars or clocks, fracture the surface. The smooth beauty of the faces begins to crack. The gestures do not simply degrade the image; rather, they complicate its reading. Many of the characters depicted (murderers, manipulators, saboteurs) already exceed the roles assigned to them. Mellor’s painterly interventions amplify this instability, refusing a fixed victimhood. Submission coexists with resentment, dissociation with latent aggression. The portraits oscillate between constraint and revolt, between imposed identity and its sabotage. Glitches and ornaments thus operate as fissures within representation itself, exposing both the violence embedded in domestic hierarchies and the instability of the cinematic images that sustain them.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments #bodmellor @oriane_durand_ @isabellabortolozzi

“Trained as a goldsmith, [Pélassy] approaches each medium—jewelry, painting, or object-making—with acute attention to execution and craft. In his work, ornament, composed of pearls, gloves, boxes, or wax, charges form with desire while subtly signaling the precarity of its material condition. […] Pelassy engages the viewer’s body directly with Viva la Muerte (1995). The curtain of glass beads, like a materialized glitch, invites passage. One can imagine the beads clacking together as the viewer passes through, transforming ornament into sound and the gesture into ritual. Death is not depicted but lived as crossing. The work defuses solemnity without denying it, situating mortality within a festive movement, where celebration and extinction brush against one another. It creates a dialogue with Félix González- Torres’ Untitled (Blood) (1992), placing Pelassy within a genealogy where ornament carries memory, mourning, and desire.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments Bruno Pelassy Sans titre (Viva la Muerte), 1995 glass beads, nylon, wood 86 5/8” x 35 3/8” #brunopelassy @airdeparis @oriane_durand_

- Bruno Pélassy Sans titre (We gonna have a good time), 1994 Graphite on paper, framed 15 1/2” x 12 3/8” Bruno Pélassy Sans titre (We gonna have a good time), 1994 -1995 framed crayon on paper 15 1/2” x 12 3/8” #brunopélassy @airdeparis @oriane_durand_

- Ull Hohn Untitled [Tan Enamel Series], 1990 latex and modeling paste on mylar 41 7/8” x 30 1/8” “In all three artists’ work, materials are never neutral. They are charged, worked, made almost organic. In Hohn’s Untitled (Tan Enamel Series) from 1990, the canvas is layered with thick beige latex and modeling clay, suggesting chocolate, earth, and excrement all at once. Fingerprints streak the surface, shattering the idea of purity associated with minimalist monochromatic painting. The work ceases to offer a smooth, perfect surface, becoming a malleable matter that confronts the viewer with a corporeality that is dirty, damaged, yet playful and sensuous. To touch this material is to engage in an ambivalent act, one that oscillates between tactile pleasure and confrontation with what is usually repressed.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments” Photos courtesy the artist and Galerie Neu. #ullhohn @galerie_neu @oriane_durand_

Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments is on view through May 2nd at CASTLE. Curated by Oriane Durand, the exhibition brings together work by Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, and Bruno Pélassy. Bruno Pélassy Sans titre, 1996 Pencil on paper, paraffin wax, pigment 9 3/8” x 10 1/4” Bod Mellor Sarah Moffat (Pauline Collins), 2015 Oil on canvas 35” x 23 2/3” #brunopélassy #bodmellor @airdeparis @isabellabortolozzi @oriane_durand_

Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments is now on view Thursday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment. “Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments brings together works by Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, and Bruno Pelassy around a central concern: how can artworks respond to the vulnerability of the body, its exposure to threat, illness, erasure, or domination? The exhibition does not seek a single resolution; rather, this tension is embedded in the works’ dense, labored surfaces, sometimes fractured or distorted. Against the modernist denunciation of ornamentation articulated by Adolf Loos in Ornament and Crime (1908), these practices reclaim ornament as a tool of resistance and critical disclosure. For its part, the glitch, originally a digital error producing pixelated or fragmented images, signals a machine’s slip. Beyond this technical definition, the glitch has become an aesthetic and political concept, designating the moment when a supposedly stable structure, such as an image, cracks. The glitch makes visible what is normally hidden: codes, hierarchies, mechanisms of power. Transposed into painting and objects, glitches operate as visual disruptions, rendering images porous and unstable.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments” Bod Mellor Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), 2015 Oil on canvas 48” x 36” #bodmellor @isabellabortolozzi @oriane_durand_ @emb

“Through glitches, ornaments, and excess, Hohn, Mellor, and Pelassy conjure forms where beauty is inseparable from pain, where the dramatic and the comical coexist, and where uncanny and outrageous deformation becomes a tool of revelation. To resist disappearance is not to erase the wound, but to give it form—intensely, excessively, with both political and sensory lucidity.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments” The exhibition opens this evening, 5pm to 7pm, through May 2nd, 2026. @oriane_durand_

OPENING TOMORROW: Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments. 5pm to 7pm, 941 N. Orange Dr., 90038. The exhibition “brings together works by Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, and Bruno Pelassy around a central concern: how can artworks respond to the vulnerability of the body, its exposure to threat, illness, erasure, or domination? The exhibition does not seek a single resolution; rather, this tension is embedded in the works’ dense, labored surfaces, sometimes fractured or distorted.” - Oriane Durand, Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments” Ull Hohn Untitled, 1988-93 Oil on wood 16” x 18” #ullhohn #brunopelassy #bodmellor @galerie_neu @airdeparis @isabellabortolozzi @oriane_durand_

- Bod Mellor Conchita (Carole Bouquet), 2015 Oil on linen 24” x 30” Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, Bruno Pélassy Curated by Oriane Durand Opening this Saturday, March 21st, 5pm to 7pm at CASTLE. @oriane_durand_ @isabellabortolozzi @emb

Opening March 21st, 2026 Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments Ull Hohn Bod Mellor Bruno Pélassy Curated by Oriane Durand 5pm to 7pm 941 N. Orange Dr. Los Angeles, CA 90038 Bruno Pélassy sans titre, 2000 White kid glove, synthetic stone 9 1/4” x 2 3/4” Courtesy the artist and Air De Paris #ullhohn #brunopelassy #bodmellor @galerie_neu @isabellabortolozzi @airdeparis @oriane_durand_

“Strobl’s quiet rejoinder is a reminder that idiosyncrasy is the remainder never standardized away. Pictures may transmit information, but power can never quite be sure that the signal is received as intended. Embodied cognition is still an analog barrier, algorithmically unbreachable, fractured but intact.” - Red Cameron, Artforum, Vol. 64, No. 7 Link in bio for the full review of Leopold Strobl’s recent exhibition at the gallery. Thank you Artforum, and thank you again Ricco/Maresca and Galerie Gugging. @artforum @riccomaresca @galerie_gugging