Jeanne Susplugas
All insomniacs please raise your right hand
Exhibition Past
June 7 to September 27, 2025
Opening Friday, June 6 at 6 p.m.
Galerie Eva Vautier is delighted to present, for the first time, a solo exhibition by artist Jeanne Susplugas. This internationally-renowned artist will occupy the gallery throughout the summer, with an immersive virtual reality device at the heart of the exhibition.
Born in Montpellier in 1974, Jeanne Susplugas holds a degree in Art History from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Since 2000, she has been developing a resolutely committed approach that questions the multiple forms of confinement - whether physical, mental or social. Through her work, she explores the relationships and distortions of the individual with himself and with others, in an obsessive and dysfunctional world.
His work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide: the KW (Berlin), the Villa Médicis (Rome), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Fresnoy - Studio National, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, the Musée de Grenoble, as well as major events such as the Alexandria Biennial, Chroniques-Biennale des imaginaires numériques and the Festival Images de Vevey.
At the heart of the exhibition: I WILL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD, a virtual reality work that invites visitors into an immersive experience. This project offers a unique introspective journey that confronts viewers with their own perceptual limits, and questions our relationship with life and death.
With distance, consistency and precision, Jeanne Susplugas creates a personal universe using a wide range of media. At the crossroads of drawing, sculpture and new technologies, her unique approach creates an aesthetic that is seductive on the surface, but quickly becomes disturbing and grating.
Jeanne Susplugas's works can be found in many prestigious collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the MUDAC (Lausanne), the Bass Museum (Miami), the Kunsthalle Detroit, and several FRACs.
Jeanne Susplugas, I will sleep when I'm dead (clock)
Interview conducted in Paris on May 31, 2025, between Jeanne Susplugas and Claudine Grammont.
CG: Each of your exhibitions tells a story. What story does All Insomniacs Please Raise Your Right Hand tell us, and what is the work that serves as the foreword?
JS: The idea for the exhibition revolves around my virtual reality piece I will Sleep When I'm Dead, which is a visual and mental wander through the brain, into our thoughts. The project began following discussions with a neuroscientist at the Pasteur Institute. How to understand the great mystery of the brain, how ideas are born. Drawing inspiration from scientific imagery, I began to create what I call “neuro-portraits”. They form the starting point for a virtual reality experience that questions what the brain generates - and above all, how we can sometimes manage to stop it working, especially at night, hence the title.
The pieces I'm showing in the exhibition are all linked to this project, whether before or after its completion in 2020. What interests me is drawing threads, starting from something, not knowing where it's going to go, and adding to the exhibition elements that have developed in parallel.
Placed in the window, the Control thread of light acts as a foreword. It evokes the control of society, the body and the mind. I'm also showing Disco Ball, a volume version of the ether molecule, part of a series of faceted balls of products that put us into altered states of consciousness, to tame thoughts that are sometimes too invasive, such as those that haunt us at night.
CG: The titles you give to your works and exhibitions are an integral part of your work.
JS: I enjoy the exercise and, indeed, titles are an integral part of my work. They are often linked to the literature that nourishes my universe. For my exhibition at La Maréchalerie in 2017, we had a long discussion about the title, At Home She's A Tourist. The use of English
and the strangeness of the choice raised questions. But in the end, it was chosen, and I liked it a lot.
My songs convey a certain lightness, even if I take things seriously. Their musicality means a lot to me, as does the evocation of a form of drama. Perhaps this also comes from my childhood: I sang in the chorus of the Montpellier Opera, and opera subtly blends beauty and tragedy. And music and the performing arts in general continue to nourish my life and my work.
The title of the exhibition, All Insomniacs Please Raise Your Right Hand, is taken from a song by the American band Set It Off, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. But I discovered this song after creating the virtual reality experience: at the time, the words referred to a Bon Jovi song.
Often, the titles come from phrases I come across while reading or in conversation, which resonate with me and my work. They are encounters. A title shouldn't close things off or give too much direction, but rather open up new avenues and offer a range of interpretations. Sometimes, I'd like words to take up more space in my drawings. They do in the Leporello notebooks, but it's different: they're like a diary, a travel diary, into which I can slip quotations and extracts. In a drawing, I'd have the impression of freezing them, of locking them up.
CG: And why do you often use English in your titles?
JS: I began my career abroad; my first gallery was in New York, in 2001. In English, words just click! When I was in the United States, I noticed that Americans were very good at “marketing” the words they use on all kinds of media. That's how I started making threads of light, the first of which, Addicted, appeared on various products and advertising campaigns. Or Fat Free, which I've also used in my work. Some of my work is in English.
CG: It reminds me of Gertrude Stein, who was fascinated when she moved to France by the gap she created with herself when she heard this foreign language.
JS: That's exactly it. It's also a way of being a stranger to oneself. From 1998 to 2006, I lived in Berlin, without speaking any German. Even though the artistic community spoke English, we came from different countries, which made for some strange situations - sometimes, with some people, we ended up speaking our own English. In cities like Dresden, English was not an option. In those days, I traveled a lot, and often felt like a tourist myself. It was this feeling that inspired the title of my 2017 exhibition at the Marechalerie: At Home She's a Tourist. Beyond the question of language, it's essential for me to always be able to distance myself, to remain, in a way, a spectator of myself.
CG : Your work constantly questions the individual's relationship with himself and with others, in the face of an obsessive, dysfunctional world. What are the societal issues that preoccupy you today, and which are echoed in this exhibition?
JS: In the exhibition, I'm showing a small glass sculpture called Bird, which represents a clitoris. We mustn't forget that its 3D modeling only dates back to 2016 - which explains why, even today, many people don't know how to identify it. This sculpture comes from VR. After completing the experiment, several people told me about the beautiful “bird” they had seen. It's precisely this discrepancy that interests me. The clitoris has become a political symbol, a sign of emancipation. It refers to women's place in society, to their sexuality, but also to sex and gender norms in a heteronormed, unequal society.
In VR, all the drawings come from interviews in which people confide in me their dreams, nightmares, fears or obsessive thoughts. These stories reflect the state of our society and touch on topical themes: the fear of losing one's job, violence in the workplace, money, illness, or the need for vacation in an increasingly demanding society - recurring concerns in these exchanges.
The installation also features an excerpt of Trump's speech coming out of a shaking alarm clock, and a suspended puppet being insulted - a scene that evokes violence against women. This passage resonates with the recent release of Suzane's song Je t'accuse, in which she challenges our failing justice system, which dismisses the majority of complaints.
CG: Your work talks a lot about addictions of all kinds. What is your relationship to social networks, the Internet and AI?
JS: In 2020, I was awarded a fellowship in New York, the aim of which was to develop the presence of my digital experience on the networks. So I tried to take a step to the side because I was doing resistance, and to see these networks as spaces for reflection.
Many of my drawings come from images I collect on the Net, which I isolate and assemble, like the drawings of African women, Sale's women, taken from press photos.
A few years ago, I came across a file of my childhood drawings - I must have been about ten years old - and it's amazing how much of my current vocabulary was already there: cigarettes, scissors, carnivorous or imaginary plants, on which houses are perched. I loved transferring shapes, gluing them and reassembling them. In the end, I still do the same thing today, even if my drawing has changed. In fact, it took me a long time to accept that it was drawing, and I wondered for a long time what my legitimacy was. But now I've come to accept the line, the shapes I color. I cultivate this deceptively naive "child's" drawing - it's the place where I feel most at home telling stories.
I also use AI like any other tool, in an artisanal way. I use it in different ways, from dialogue with a kind of “presence” that would have time - AI is strangely human and “benevolent” - to the creation of singular images.
CG: You start from this very flat, very simple 2D drawing, to make complex installations, fabrications and layouts.
JS: Yes, it's important to me. In my work, there's this inner/outer link, very small/very large, which certainly comes from childhood. My parents were researchers at the Faculty of Pharmacy and, with my sister, they used to put us in front of microscopes when they weren't finished.
to work. When I started photography, I immediately wanted to do macro. I was taught to look at tiny things and I've kept this strong relationship to scale. In the end, I'm not really interested in real proportions. My drawings are almost all mental cartographies made of piles. So the same drawing can tell different stories depending on who's looking at it. What's more, I'm interested in the imagery used in psychiatry and psychology, what the patient projects. But also what we perceive depending on where we are, which partly skews the interpretation.
These complex arrangements allow me to make spaces my own, to re-architect them. An exhibition can't just be beautiful or virtuoso: it has to win people over. That's why you have to reach out and grab visitors by the hand - through seduction, strangeness or derision.
CG: What does animation offer you compared to drawing? I like exploring different mediums and experimenting.
JS: When I first started working with the brain, I was fascinated by people's reactions to my In my brain portraits, as they tried to retell their stories.
If I wanted to do a project in virtual reality, I waited for “the right” project, and the brain triggered the process. In VR, there's this sensation of infinity, like the possibilities offered by the brain. To make I will Sleep When I'm Dead, I first drew and cut out my 2D drawings, then I created volume shapes with a 3D graphic artist, which we textured with my drawings. When I saw my own 360° drawing on headphones, faithful to what I had imagined, I was seduced by this panoramic vision, which made me want to redraw them. So I did, and curiously enough, the experience brought me back to painting.
In Là où habite ma maison, which I produced at the invitation of the Jeu de Paume and which I'm presenting upstairs, drawing and animation offered me a form of immediacy that resonated with the urgency of the moment: that of responding “on the spot” to confinement. I had entrusted the testimonies I had collected to the author Claire Castillon, so that she could bring a grating distance to them - that acid yet sensitive tone that marks our meeting point.
CG: Your drawings often take the form of a tree structure.
JS: Arborescence is, in fact, very present in my work: family trees, hair, neurons, chemical formulas, it's often a question of ramifications. Drawing physical or conceptual “threads” also means exploring how one thing can feed another.
In my daily practice, this logic is akin to a form of research, inherited from my university training. I like it when one book leads me to another, or to a film or a show, with no hierarchy of sources.
I will Sleep When I'm Dead evokes the way thought travels through networks of synapses: a pseudo-psychoanalytical journey that some feel like swimming, others like flying. These journeys, which you can make, redo or never return to, also evoke lost opportunities. Not in a nostalgic way, but as an open-ended question: what would my life have been like if I'd turned left instead of right?