Christophe Muylaert

This installation isolates and suspends an everyday scenario: a tongue poised to lick a lollipop. Encased separately in transparent resin, the lollipop and the silicone tongue are immobilized at the very moment where contact and fulfillment are anticipated but indefinitely postponed.

By freezing this familiar micro-event, the installation makes visible the automatic associations and causal expectations the mind produces involuntarily. The viewer intuitively completes the scene, projecting taste, pleasure, and satisfaction, even though no material action can occur. Anticipation thus emerges as an autonomous phenomenon, detached from physical execution.

The instruction “do not lick”, written on the pink plinth, functions simultaneously as prohibition, absurd reminder, and institutional command. It echoes parental discipline, museum etiquette, and moral regulation, reinforcing the tension between desire and restriction. The work stages desire not as excess or transgression, but as something regulated, displayed, and rendered unusable.

Frozen Desires reflects on how contemporary experience increasingly consists of deferred gratification, mediated encounters, and desires preserved as images or objects rather than lived sensations. Desire remains present, glowing and precise, yet permanently out of reach.