David Douard’s works combine films, soundtracks, as well as tweaked and motorised everyday objects to create environments of overlapping digital, virtual, mechanical and material experiences, including an unsettling animism. Organic, porous and complex, his work deploys itself within boundaries and imitates the dynamics of a proliferating virus, insinuating itself into the “ills of reality” and the contamination of the world, and infiltrating the mysteries and anomalies of our programming.

The installation Keep Soothe and Carry On, made in 2014, is an installation that takes its starting point in its title, which Douard got from the classic English slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Reflecting present-day reality, this installation is represented in the form of a marketing slogan, with the launch of several derived objects (cups, T-shirts, posters…). That is why Douard has retained the R of a trademark, serving as a powerful symbol in the installation.

He decided to use this advertisement as a tranquilizer in society. The rest of the installation serves as elements of a disordered society which the slogan addresses. A massive piece of plaster responds to the slogan, claiming on its surface, "u make me sick” as the response of a sick yet still resistant society. Saliva fountains project a disjointed yet highly poetic text. This is the street where people take the floor and infiltrate into the material of the objects. The elements coexisting in this installation generate dialogues, resistances and openings. The walls are seen as castrating ones, as the pieces in the middle shut themselves again to fight, muted. Here, a contamination passing from language to objects is necessarily resistant to the simple phrase, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Douard has exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); and Sculpture Center, New York (2014), Signal, Malmö, Sweden (2013); Les Eglises, Chelles, France (2012); and Bétonsalon, Paris (2012). Group exhibitions include the David Roberts Foundation, London (2014); the Biennale de Lyon (2013); T293, Naples (2013); and 1857, Oslo (2013). Douard is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.