Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton at diez

Artist: Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton

Exhibition title: Ombre Portée

Venue: diez, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: November 11, 2023 – January 20, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and diez, Amsterdam

The practice of Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, an artist duo based between Paris and Lausanne, is built around image making. In some cases, they work from sources taken from cinema, television or comics, then modify them through various pictorial processes. In others, the image is constructed through drawing or photography. Collage, painting and silkscreening are the tools they use to manipulate, arrange and recontextualize these visual fragments.

In this exhibition, Degen and Jaton display a collection of images that prompt an internal dialogue, weaving subjective connections between different typologies of spaces, atmospheres, and representations. Deploying various visual methodologies, including superimposition, Degen and Jaton deliberately reveal or conceal the origins of their images and the diverse techniques employed in their construction.

These relationships raise the question of the image’s autonomy, as well as its interconnection with forms of visual archetypes. It is through these formal games based on an evolving aesthetic language that Degen and Jaton destabilize the prevalent binarity between form and content in our relationship to the image.

The title, “Ombre Portée”, a projected object’s shadow onto a surface, can refer to the fundamental mechanism of cinema, in which represented, fictitious and real topologies are intertwined, or understood as double. In this way, this process produces a sense of introspection for the viewer, in which mental space blends into the image.

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Ombre Portée, 2023, exhibition view, diez, Amsterdam

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Untitled, Silkscreen ink on paper mounted, on plywood, 96x33cm, 37.8x13in

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Ombre Portée, 2023, exhibition view, diez, Amsterdam

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Untitled, Silkscreen ink on paper mounted on plywood, 105 x 65 cm, 41.3 x 25.6 in

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Ombre Portée, 2023, exhibition view, diez, Amsterdam

Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Untitled, Silkscreen ink on paper mounted on plywood, 35 x 25 cm, 13.77 x 9.84 in; Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton, Untitled, Silkscreen ink on paper mounted on plywood, 35 x 25 cm, 13.77 x 9.84 in