JEANNE VICERIAL

For the Pupation exhibition, Vicérial fills the gallery’s original space in Rue Beaubourg in Paris with her “presences”, the large sculptures in crocheted or smoothed black thread that are so characteristic of her practice. The show is an ode to transformation in all its facets. Vicérial depicts it in various forms: as an awakening of the material, illustrated by the work in tribute to Pierre Soulages where the beyond-black thread stretched taut on the canvas suddenly flows in waves to the floor; as artistic creation via a process of exploration and experimentation, the process that precedes the nascent work, and as the gestation that is exclusive to viviparous beings.

Silent presences watch the visitor in a room transformed into what could be a private bedroom or holy chapel, draped in black, the lighting subdued. Engrossed in a romantic embrace, in the middle of giving birth or living out their twilight years, they seem to be in the grip of a transition. Like a moment frozen in time, Vicérial attempts to capture the transformation paving the way to the (re)birth of these unclassifiable beings, these supernatural nymphs, half- plant, half-animal.

“Our environment abounds in these metamorphoses,” she explains. “My thread turns into a cocoon right in front of my eyes, and a sculpture emerges from it. Everything undergoes transformation.” Alongside them is a wall featuring small “sex-votos” made from a single, ink- coloured thread. For the first time, the artist has inlaid them with nuggets of bronze and fine gold. The objects-as-offerings beg the question, what exactly do they evoke? Female genitals? Insects? Extraterrestrial bodies? These enigmatic creatures highlight a great taboo of society: the fear of the passing time, of change, of decline, vulnerability and death.