NICK DOYLE: BUSINESS, PLEASURE, PRESSURE, RELEASE
Perrotin is pleased to present Business, Pleasure, Pressure, Release, Nick Doyle’s second solo exhibition in Paris, delving into the playground of white-collar existence: the office environment.
February 1 - March 8, 2025
A fantasy of American labor may be of a worker in denim, a Marlboro Man with his sleeves rolled, but the truth is that the modern office is itself a decidedly American invention. Landlines, cubicle dividers, filing cabinets—the buzzy appliances of the early twentieth-century office— were all concocted in the United States through a chop-shop style recombination of old forms. While the first sites to adopt the devices are known for interminable paperwork and sagging middle management, the appliances enabling this work were glorious little monsters.
Consider even that stalwart of every bureaucratic environment: the filing cabinet. Before its invention at the end of the nineteenth century in Chicago, errant papers—letters, pamphlets, newspapers—were stitched together to become archived, bound, and fixed in a sequence. In this era, to find a single page, heavy bound volumes needed to be hauled and poured through, usually without the aid of an index. The word file, derived from the Latin filum, or “thread,” bears a vestige of the practice of sewing pages together, etymologically linked to the “single file” march of people and livestock in tidy lines, and the military term “rank and file.”
In Doyle’s formulation, the Executive Toy series offers sequences of working men operated by a hand crank. Executive Toy: The Final Chapter (2019) portrays a sedan becoming a hermetic system: exhaust pipe and car interior are connected by hose. In Lonely Road (2019), half of a dismembered car takes the road; the driver has slipped a paper bag over his head; the hint of a necktie peeks through from under the sack. In the current exhibition, American Boy Doll: John (2025) a miniature man is inlaid inside a briefcase, head face down and covered with a paper bag. John comes with accessories: shoes, martini, and yet a smaller briefcase.
If the j-o-b sounds like horror, it’s because it is. But horror always starts with optimism. Need to get away? Need cash? Slip into this little sliver of hope, let it slide over you like bubbly water in a warm tub or salt waves lapping the beach. Get in.