LINSEED is delighted to present the duo show “Nocturnal Animals” from March 18 to May 10, 2025, featuring works by Chinese artist Antone LIU (b.1999, Anshan, China) who currently lives and works in Frankfurt and Wuxi, and Austrian artist Daniel MOLDOVEANU (b.1999, Romania) who currently lives and works in Berlin. 

Emerging in late 19th-century France, Decadent literature defiantly rejected the era’s naturalist conventions and moralistic narratives, plunging into a radical excavation of aesthetic subjectivity. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours epitomizes this ethos: its reclusive aristocrat meticulously curates a private sanctuary of excess, dissolving reality through the osmotic fusion of art and life to recode existence as a complex weave of perception, sensation, and ethical entanglements. By staging an eternal duel between individual desire and societal constraints, Decadent literature reconfigured humanism’s contemporary relevance—Huysmans’ microscopic material obsessions (from handcrafted minutiae to the molecular texture of objects) suspended artistry on a precarious tightrope between corporeal indulgence and intellectual freedom, collapsing ethics into a fluid experiential field that shattered rigid moral binaries.

This aesthetic DNA mutated across generations: Oscar Wilde weaponized dandyism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, forging life-as-art into a dagger against Victorian hypocrisy; F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, refracted the abyss of capitalist modernity through the gilded mirage of the Jazz Age. The specter of Decadence materialized further in the sinuous motifs of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the golden arabesques of the Vienna Secession, and 20th-century collage and conceptual practices—where ornamental excess blurred utility and purity, and matter ascended to metaphysical poetics. This nocturnal aesthetic insurrection, born in the 19th century’s twilight, persists in rewriting the grammar of human cognition.

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