JEANNE VICERIAL

TEMPLON’s Paris space on 28 Rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare will be starting 2023 decked in ebony black and white with an exhibition of work by clothes designer and researcher Jeanne Vicerial. For her first TEMPLON show in Paris, the artist is unveiling no less than fifteen textile sculptures in various formats.

Jeanne Vicerial was selected for a residency at the prestigious Villa Medici in 2020, and at not yet 30 is the first person in France to be awarded a PhD in practice-based fashion design. Recognised for her avantgarde approach which overthrows textile industry codes, she uses her work to question the ways contemporary clothing is conceived as well as the made-to measure/ready-to-wear dichotomy then shifts focus to the place of women and the female body in society.

This new exhibition sees Vicerial installing a silent army of figures crystalised over time. Skilled in the art of neologism, she breathes life into these “Armors”, her disturbing warrior women formed of love (“amour”) and armour (“armure”), covering the mannequins entirely in her black thread. At the heart of the exhibition an imposing articulated robot, controlled by a design software program, dances around the sculpture, weaving a web to capture it with a succession of delicate, endlessly repeated movements. This unique creative process spawns various “presences”: a handful of recumbent women, close to divine, lie on their tombstones in a darkened basement; mysterious female figures, half-monster, half-warrior, are the stuff of mythology.

The pilgrimage of femininity moves to a different stage a little further on with a cabinet of curiosities dedicated to “sex-votos”. The artist covers the spotlessly white walls with an accumulation of objects-asofferings. As she explains: “It’s interesting to note the parallels between the textile industry and the world of sculpture: both fields use the term ‘seams’ for the junction points, the places where parts interlink.” Mangled or dismembered, these flowering vulvas, tiny vestimentary organs and Venus bellies seem to look for their bearings. With these curious ceremonial objects, Vicerial dives deeper into an exploration of the contemporary place of the feminine and female bodies, alternately worshiped and abused over thousands of years.

A new book will be published to mark the exhibition.