Ceysson & Bénétière

 

For its summer exhibition from June 29 to July 28, 2023, the Ceysson & Bénétière gallery is delighted to give carte blanche to exhibition curator Vittoria Matarrese, director of the Bally Foundation, after Exo Exo with the collaboration of Clara Guislain, Léa Chauvel-Lévy, Hugo Vitrani, Bernard Collet. Bringing together four artists around the poem Jabberwocky, by the famous author Lewis Carroll, Vittoria Matarrese creates a playful space that invites us to go beyond appearances.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the looking glass, Alice looks at a mirror wondering what lies within. To her great surprise, her wish is met, and the mirror becomes like a gate. The Jabberwocky poem appears at the very beginning of the book and tells the classic chivalrous story of an audacious hero who goes on to fight an evil monster (the Jabberwock), triumphs over it, and comes back home covered with glory.  But the poem is printed backward and can only be read using a mirror. Besides, it is written in a fictional tongue, or to be more precise, in a tongue full of portmanteau words that spark the reader’s imagination.  

In a couple of lines, Lewis Carroll lays down the topic of the book: facing one’s inner monster, going on an epic journey within oneself, and disrupting the established order. As she goes through the looking glass, the young Alice is whimsically and playfully confronted with the question of the twin, with her contradictions and dark side, often represented by the Queen of Hearts, the maleficent embodiment of her personality. 

In many ways, the works of the artists selected for this exhibition, Julie Béna, Noël Dolla, Tania Mouraud, and ORLAN explore the idea of play as an essential element of creativity, through the multiplication of identities, stories, and media. While, from the beginning of his career, Dolla has been working on the radical deconstruction of the concepts and tools of painting, here, the artist uses the object as the raw material of his “luring” works, revealing their literality -as lures- with a lot of humor, and questioning the represented object and the very reality of the artistic image, its deception, and mystification. 

Tania Mouraud presents a piece specially conceived for  the exhibition directly referencing Lewis Carrol’s poem, in which she prolongs her exploration of writing as a plastic element and trompe-l’oeil.The monumental scale of her work, the play between positive and negative letters, and the duality between black and white, create an abstract form in which words have to be deciphered. Thus the language - painting- becomes dependent upon our perception. As for ORLAN’s works, they represent virgins, mythical figures, and pictorial icons, and have to do with the invention of new identities. The artist’s body is constantly multiplying, questioning the notion of conformity and standard. It is a “suitcase-body”, for which the notion of simulacrum should be understood not in the sense of “simulation”, but, rooted in its etymology, of artificial figuration of an absent object, a body that is constantly trying to get out of the constraints of its own representation. 

The absurd world vision given by Julie Béna, her fictional and autofictional processes and her protagonists cut into pieces -eyes, mouths, boots…- weave the threads of a parallel universe where times and stories overlay, tinted with playfulness and dark humor, and calling into question the normative representations of the (often female) body and the teaching of official history, while exploring the complexity of identity. 

Vittoria Matarrese , April 2023

 

Artists :
Julie Béna
Noël Dolla
Tania Mouraud
ORLAN

---

Visitor Information

Ceysson & Bénétière
23 rue du Renard
75004 Paris

Gallery hours:
Tuesday - Saturday
11am - 7pm
T: + 33 1 42 77 08 22