Julie Monot & Gil Pellaton at Ferme de la Chapelle

Artists: Julie Monot & Gil Pellaton

Exhibition title: Cosmique cosmétique

Curated by: Collectif Détente (Gabrielle Boder & Tadeo Kohan)

Venue: Ferme de la Chapelle, Lancy, Geneva, Switzerland

Date: August 29 – September 27, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Ferme de la Chapelle

For Cosmique cosmétique Julie Monot and Gil Pellaton have composed a Cyborgian narrative, providing hints of a fable which rings strange yet familiar. Moving between the domains of ancestral myth and science fiction, their creations strain against the exhibition space, climb, open out, cross-breed, mutate. They are both protagonists – chimerical creatures – and signs – prints, moults – revealing the existence or absence of invisible bodies. Whether organic or artificial, the objects appear to be waiting to be seized or to move, revealing a fragmented and latent physicality. Cosmique cosmétique, the first artistic encounter between Monot and Pellaton, is designed as a sort of mad treasure hunt where each piece occupies a dreamlike realm emerging from a collective and biological fantasy.

Curators of the exhibition and of the performance calendar of La Nuit remue, Gabrielle Boder and Tadeo Kohan from collectif détente. A partnership with the Geneva Batie Festival.

In this exhibition, the works of Julie Monot and Gil Pellaton occupy the space with clues to a fable which mixes vocabularies of popular stories, ancestral myths and science fiction. Cosmic cosmétique invites us to reflect on the combination of bodies and substances, the continual transformation of a world which we try to appropriate, explain and organise indefatigably. At this, their first meeting, the two artists conjure a fantasy to convey what is unknowable, controversial and disturbing. But it also acts as a potential glimpse of reality which fleetingly imprints, incarnates and reveals itself.

Gil Pellaton projects us into an archaic future of organic mutations in which the body changes itself on contact with natural patterns. Or, on the contrary? Where human presence and activity are suspended, in the negative. Shell faces appear and then are lost on the aluminium surface, or they crystallise into an evolving leaf-mask. The body, always in fragments, suggests itself in impossible accessories or through an aquatic moonwalk. The printing and moulding techniques that the artist frequently uses, evoke a sensual proximity between objects and subjects; a contact which doesn’t respect the distance needed for seeing but invites physical contact.

This relationship between touch and anthropomorphism also appears in the work of Julie Monot. Examining the metamorphosis between objects, bodies and decors, her works invent pop surrealism, camp theatre. For the exhibition, she has invited fragmented people, in hollows and volume. Their ghostly presence is incarnated in the vestiges of an electrum mine, in the swollen sleeper swaddled in a hydrocarbon skin, or the bland dressing room of an ersatz princess who resembles Grace Kelly and who closes her eyes to her own image. Counter forms, these sham interiors suggest that habitat and attire are just as fantastic as self-representation.

The 16mm video Big Bang, produced for the exhibition stages the implosion of the initial instant. This account of the cosmic dawn is told at the human scale set against humorous and poetic choreography for the stars and planets.

Offering original narratives of future utopias, the exhibition expresses a fantastic cosmology in which the works are both protagonists – chimerical creatures – and signs – prints, moults, traces. Mixing cosmic materials (which form worlds) and cosmetic substances (ornamenting the body, skin and appendages), Julie Monot and Gil Pellaton organise, in the space-time of the exhibition, a universe, a transitory order (kósmos), an interconnected network of objects and uses shared without being able to be fully articulated or rationalised. // Gabrielle Boder & Tadeo Kohan.

Julie Monot & Gil Pellaton, Cosmique cosmétique, 2020, exhibition view, Ferme de la Chapelle, Lancy, Geneva