PARIS.- The band INDOCHINE has passed the test of time with flying colors, and has now completed its 13th album, for the occasion designing the cover in collaboration with photographer Erwin Olaf. Since the release of the album, from the 9th until the 23rd of September, Rabouan Moussion Gallery accompanies this event presenting on its walls the entire body of the original photographies of the booklet signed by Erwin Olaf, as well as the video of the its making of.

The album is entitled 13 and is composed of thirteen tracks plus two bonuses, while its cover features thirteen outlandish characters.

Contemporary art has been at the heart of the visual universe of this group, a pillar of the French pop-rock scene since 1981, marked by a long history of artistic collaborations, the American artist Ana Bagayan portraying the world of Alice & June (2005), for example. Their videos are also the fruit of encounters with directors such as Jaco van Dormael for Ladyboy (2006), Xavier Dolan for the controversial College Boy (2013), photographer Richard Kern with Black City Parade (2013), and now La Vie est Belle, the first single of 13, directed by Asia Argento.

The work of Erwin Olaf for this release is inspired by that of Henry Darger, a representative of American outsider art, remarked by Nicola Sirkis at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris in 2015.

Erwin Olaf has maintained the childish universe, staging thirteen girls in costume and brandishing mysterious banners, in photographic compositions infused with the unsettling strangeness that Freud evokes. A cosmopolitan army in charge of a new world poses proudly in front of what might be its palace, a concrete edifice that seems straight out of a movie by Fritz Lang. It is actually a disused radio station dating back to 1919, located in the Dutch countryside. The contrast between the colorful pastel costumes of these authoritarian little girls and the dark tones of the architecture echoes Darger's phantasmagoric realms which Olaf appropriates imprinting them with his characteristic aura. Connoisseurs of his work will be able to recognize some of the themes of the Berlin (2012) and Keyhole (2011-2013) series.