Studio

The Palais de Tokyo presents the first retrospective of Cathy de Monchaux, a major figure on the British art scene, through a collection of around fifty works dating from 1984 to today. The exhibition pulls us between epidermal desires and dangers, bringing together technical drawings, archives of destroyed works, sculptures and installations, vertical or horizontal, on the wall or on the floor; the artist challenges benchmarks, particularly the phallocentrism of philosophical and artistic language, a "privilege granted to rectitude [...] to the symbolism of the phallus and thereby reducing woman to matter-matrix, to mother, to vagina-uterus."

It is also a play of dimensions, from the intimate to the demonstrative, and of materials, from the grain of velvet to the chilling metal, which lacerates our vulnerabilities to revive their power.

A clinical gaze could dissect folds, lead, dust, tracing paper, lace of rivets, straps, marble, orifices, fairy vulvas, intertwined unicorns and frogs teeming in forests of rooted bodies, where trees protect the opacity of landscapes.

There are also references among others: the thought of minimalism, Gothic impulses (Victorian era) with cryptic details, romanticism, symbolism, the forests of Shakespeare and Paolo Uccello, invisible beliefs, battles, science fiction.

There are also titles that bear witness to the artist's writing work, like so many effervescent tones: "Never forget the power of the tears".

Her more recent work emerges in bas-relief like an imaginary in backlight, frozen between the urgency of dazzling light and the invasive panic in a fractal universe: lianas are roots that are bodies that are souls that are struggles that could also be imprints to be healed.

Composed like battle paintings, it also deals with depth and new perspectives, in hollow. We find armies of unicorns that refer very directly to the artist's oldest work, always present in her studio as a protective totem, which she had created as a student.

A skeleton like an armature, in traumatic memory of a car accident where the artist almost died, followed by an accident involving her horse.

One might think that at this precise moment her wounded imagination took shape, where structures always support as much as they attach, oppress. The artist's sculpture is that of the great small gap – this displacement