By appointment only. Confirmation @
[email protected] +33787298701 // It's winter, it's time for introspection. This exhibition presents the latest series of works by Manon Couse. This young visual artist and photographer is above all interested in the human condition, beyond any anecdotism, through dimensions that are childhood, time, the feminine, the masculine, sexuality, and faith. According to her, these are questions that it is up to each generation to reconsider, and whose being present must dialogue with the ideas of yesteryear, both aesthetically and iconographically. This series of collages, which tends to enclose his nude subjects in a cosmic space making the spectator voyeur like a Balthus, is part of a larger work on the Feminine and the question of gender than the artist does. has not finished exploring. Through the study of the Italian Renaissance and its connection with contemporary art, Manon Couse attempts to define an archetypal constancy of the feminine ideal. In the 15th and 16th centuries, women found themselves deified and adored in predefined roles, respectively embodying physical beauty and moral beauty. The cohabitation between Christianity and Neoplatonism attributes to two major female figures these distinctive roles: the goddess Venus and the Virgin Mary. Aristotle defined perfection in his Metaphysics: "what is complete is perfect, what is so good that nothing is better, or what has fulfilled its destiny". These two figures are then the respective archetypes of the shape of the female body (which is so good that nothing is better) and of its function (which has fulfilled its destiny). What is complete, would it not then, as Umberto Eco expresses it so well, sensitive beauty, the vector of ultra-sensitive beauty? Manon Couse therefore wanted to unite these two archetypes into a single ideal. The feminine becomes almost a paradox, the union of two opposites that are ultimately complementary. This last series presents women, girls, strong, weak, in love or loved, alive or extinct, deep or not, impersonal or unique. Thus, the artist asks herself: "woman, who am I? An object of desire or a person who desires? A creative power or a created power? Am I passive or active? How not to wonder in a world gender that seems to be undone? And because as a woman, I am revolutionized, I wonder who you are, you, man? " The series ends with a male nude with a loving gaze on women, and depicting Mapplethorpe, thus paying a larger tribute to nude photography, perpetuating the power of the artistic aura.
