Julie Villard and Simon Brossard
accompanied by drawings by Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer was born in 1902 in what is now Poland. Julie Villard and Simon Brossard in 1992 and 1994 in France. The crossing between these two shores is geographical, temporal, it involves material mutations and social revolutions, and a change of habits. On these two shores, at the collective scale as at the individual scale, nothing is the same. The drift between the gastronomic imagery, post-industrial aesthetics and references to cartoons and cinema from the 80s and the epistolary exchanges concerning the life-size doll that Oskar Kokoschka wanted to have made to console him after his break-up is vertiginous. Yet from these two banks springs a greedy desire for the pleasures of the body, an eroticization of the anatomy - human or otherwise - from forms that are constantly stretched, curved, brutalized, fetishized and perverted. In an anatomical explosion, Julie Villard and Simon Brossard’s exotic animals and plants simultaneously reveal their carnivorous appetites, their orifices, their mouths, their eyes or their udders. The bar with petroleum-colored reflections accompanies this intoxication. We are hungry as we are thirsty. All around, Bellmer's human or organic anamorphoses remind us that when we are hungry and thirsty, death is never far away. Dry but voracious, the creatures at work here seek to vampirize other species in an insatiable desire for hybridization. Red eyes, tired, continue swimming to reach the other shore.
- Elisa Rigoulet