Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the reiteration of hope. Cathy de Monchaux

Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo presents the first retrospective of Cathy de Monchaux, a major figure of the British art scene, through a set of some fifty works dating from 1984 to today. The exhibition pulls us between desires and visceral dangers, bringing together technical drawings, archives of destroyed works, sculptures and installations, vertical or horizontal, on the wall or on the floor; the artist unsettles our points of reference, in particular the phallocracy of philosophical and artistic language, a "privilege granted to rectitude […] to the symbolism of the phallus and, by the same token, the reduction of woman to matter-matrix, to the mother, to the vagina-womb." It is also a play of dimensions, from the intimate to the demonstrative, and of materials, from the grain of velvet to the chill of metal, which lacerates our vulnerabilities in order to revive their power. A clinical eye could dissect folds, lead, dust, tracing paper, lace made of rivets, straps, marble, orifices, fairy-tale vulvas, interlacings of unicorns and frogs teeming in forests of rooted bodies, where trees protect the opacity of landscapes. There are also references, among others: minimalist thought, Gothic impulses (Victorian era) with cryptic details, Romanticism, Symbolism, the forests of Shakespeare and Paolo Uccello, invisible beliefs, battles, science fiction. There are also titles that testify to the artist's writing practice, like so many effervescent tonalities: "Never forget the power of the tears". Her more recent work emerges in bas-relief like an imagination seen in backlight, frozen between the urgency of dazzlement and pervasive panic in a fractal universe: the vines are roots which are bodies which are souls which are struggles which could also be wounds to be dressed. Composed like battle paintings, they also raise questions of depth and new perspectives, in hollow. We find here armies of unicorns that refer very directly to the artist's earliest work, still present in her studio like a protective totem, which she made as a student. A skeleton like an armature, in traumatic memory of a car accident in which the artist nearly died, followed by an accident with her horse. One might think that it was at that precise moment that her wounded imagination took shape, where structures always support as much as they bind, oppress. The artist's sculpture is one of the great small divide – that shift which makes sensuality threatening and fright hypnotic. The fabric of sorrow is never far away, beneath the prickly armatures, the fossils, the memories, the prostheses, the fetishes, beneath the surface of bodies and feelings. In search of an intimate, political and collective emotional overload, Cathy de Monchaux's work kneads forms as it does emotions, until it leaves this taste in our eye: that of metal under the tongue, where one can even find a moment of contemplation.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗