LOS ANGELES, CA.-As part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Contemporary Projects series, French artists Petra Mrzyk (b.1973) and Jean-François Moriceau (b. 1974) have created a large-scale, site-specific wall drawing installation inspired by, and incorporating, twenty-five prints from nineteenth-century Belgian Symbolist artist Félicien Rops (1833–1898) from the museum’s permanent collection. Contemporary Projects 10: Mrzyk & Moriceau and Félicien Rops—You Only Live 25 Times, the first Los Angeles exhibition by these artists, remains on view through June 4, 2006.

For their ephemeral wall drawing, Mrzyk and Moriceau integrate a selection of Rops prints taken from the museum’s extensive collection of nine hundred works by the artist, which was generously given by Michael G. Wilson in 1983, and is one of the largest in the United States.

Referencing popular imagery and literary, philosophical, and political sources, Mrzyk and Moriceau ironically combine dark humor and absurd elements with a graphic, elegant style. Spidery imagery bordering on the Gothic creates an aura of sinister, anxious thoughts, alongside a graphic repertoire of body parts, deformations, and strange characters enveloped and destroyed by carnivorous plants or swallowed by mechanical devices.

Rops too used irony in his well-known drawings, which often expressed strong opinions about religion, politics, and culture by using both erotic and satanic imagery. In his renderings, everyday objects, such as chairs, were fitted with eyes, suggesting an omniscient power to spy on human beings. Sexual organs were disembodied, floating in the air and morphing into threatening monsters.

You Only Live 25 Times, organized by LACMA Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow Noëllie Roussel, incorporates Mrzyk and Moriceau’s playful yet ironic style with Rops’ sense of humor. Influenced by Rops, Mrzyk and Moriceau integrate his stylistic elements and imagery with their own artistic language. Together, the work of these three artists forms an exhibition steeped in the long tradition of drawing, while remaining distinctly contemporary and provocative. Michael G. Wilson, the donor of the Rops collection to LACMA, is a producer of James Bond films, and Mrzyk and Moriceau often base the titles of their works on Bond movies, as they do here.