CURA.

Charlie Fox’s latest show, Flowers of Romance Act One, on view at Lodovico Corsini in Brussels, is an intoxicating exploration of love’s many facets—an emotional labyrinth intertwining obsession, eroticism, and the uncanny in a psychedelic environment. Curated with a ‘dissociative sensibility,’ the show functions as both a hallucinatory playground and a literary investigation, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve.

The show recalls Fox’s previous endeavours, such as My Head is a Haunted House and Dracula’s Wedding, in delivering a concoction of the freakish and the otherworldly—a space where magical objects flirt, seduce, and unsettle. The notion of love as a drug underpins the show’s essence, amplifying the spectrum of emotional experiences, from intimacy to despair. Viewers find themselves immersed in an atmosphere reminiscent of a Gothic romance, filled with mystery and foreboding, reflecting the transformation of romantic obsession into madness.

The show unfolds in two acts: The Day of the Smitten Leopards and The Night of the Heartbroken Raccoon. The first act embodies the intoxicating beauty of love. This structural division echoes the tumultuous emotional landscape often found in literature, highlighting how love can curdle into delusion. From Nobuyoshi Araki’s provocative photography to George Kuchar’s whimsical creations, each piece blurs the line between the enchanting and the grotesque.

Through its hallucinatory dreamscapes—keenly aware of both horror literature and the environmental simulation in video games that evoke feelings of dread and disorientation—the show seems to parallel Gothic literature’s anxieties about forces beyond human understanding. It blends modern fears of technological control with surreal settings, reflecting the blurred boundaries of human agency and how technological advancements simultaneously enhance and destabilise our perception of reality. Much like the characters in Gothic literature—where scientific inquiry and magical forces spiral out of control—Fox’s exploration of love challenges the very fabric of reality.

 Flowers of Romance transcends a mere show about love; it offers a profound meditation on the monstrous nature of desire, revealing how love distorts and reshapes the world around us.

Much like a haunted house from Fox’s childhood, the exhibition provides a space where imagination thrives, and where the strange and the freakish become portals to deeper truths about human emotion. In this romantic universe, being in love is akin to wandering through a haunted house, trapped by the seductive forces that linger within.