Exhibit Opening
4:00pm – 9:00pm
2 November 2018
Rogue Space #9 E-F-G
508-526 West 26th Street
Between 10 & 11th Avenue
Chelsea, NY 10001
RSVP for the opening: info@galeriemonnin.com
The exhibit will be on view from Saturday November 3rd to Saturday November 10th Open every day from 10am to 6pm.
Pascale Monnin last exhibited in Manhattan 5 years ago. This November, she returns to the city with [Decodings], a solo exhibit organized by GALERIE MONNIN NYC.
[ Decodings ], both a celebration of the world and an evidence of Monnin’s estrangement from it, presents more than a hundred paintings, mobiles and sculptures. Punctuated by Monnin’s obsessions: history, politics, debt, myths, complexity, animals, plants, life, childhood, time, movement, the sacred, faces, vertigo…, it reveals many facets of her artwork and displays a world of warring births, dazzling impulses, hybrid forms, with reckless nuances of a childhood spreading sometimes cast in stone, sometimes lying on the frame as the art spills over.
To succeed in making an artist’s work accessible, we first need to figure out the kind of questions the artist is asking and the particular challenges they are posing in the work, and Monnin is like a shadow run through by innumerable and glimmering questions:
How do we paint portraits of the great of this world? How do we decode them, unmask them, if there is a mask behind the masks? How do we name childhood without inviting in the echoes of the old world? How do we name that world without confronting our own confusion? Art in that sense is a suspended path where our dreams and nightmares, our dances and side steps are anchored. Which animal is awakened in us when childhood calls? What do we owe our children? What happens when adults become children again? Does death exist? What does it want from us beyond our physical shell? Are we unique? Is our thumb green enough to reverse the slope of history, of global warming?
How do we ascertain honestly who and what we are? How do we calculate, dance, weigh the value and waltz of one’s life? How do we stare at a star without becoming blind, or being struck by a frontal chaos? One needs much chaos in oneself, wrote Nietzsche, in order to conceive a dancing star.
In this world run through by typhoons and movement, a hummingbird flaps its wings 200 times per second. A tree has an average 8500 leaves whereas the skin of a dog is made of 15,000 hair. All these fragments of the truth settle in us with or without fracas depending on the moment and contribute to our foundation and beliefs.
In that case, Monnin’s art is a suspended dance floor where she anchors her dreams and nightmares, her dances and sidesteps. In her world, shapes break free from the names and roles traditionally assigned to them. Her artistic language displays a new range of possibilities and adds layers of burning freshness to the story. She knocks on wood, and her paintbrush hides the forest for the trees.
The exhibit will be on view from Saturday November 3rd to Saturday November 10th Open every day from 10am to 6pm.
Above text and image adapted from email.
