For its summer exhibition à bras-le-corps, the Galerie Eva Vautier brings together Béatrice Lussol and Agnès Vitani, two artists on the borders of the real…
For its summer exhibition à bras-le-corps, the Galerie Eva Vautier brings together Béatrice Lussol and Agnès Vitani, two artists on the borders of the real and of abstraction. Echoing the solo exhibition by Jeanne Susplugas, Tout semblait pourtant si calme, at the Citadelle de Villefranche-sur-Mer, we are presenting the film Dissolution upstairs at the gallery. Béatrice Lussol obsessively works the vulval form, multiplied, becoming vibrating landscapes, theatres of fairy-like detail. She practises collage, writing, painting or drawing, and uses watercolour, that so-called hobby medium, in the service of a body of work she accepts being described as engaged and feminist. She uses the rosy softness of watercolour, its wet quality, that of mucous membranes and flesh: explicit, volatile, deep, light and directed, yielding fictions or twisted organs, funny and/or disturbing, shelters of nutritive and energetic elements, right up to their crumbling, in fragments, into relative abstraction. Agnès Vitani, for her part, appropriates in her works a principle of overflow and contamination. Gathering, foraging, whether real or through photographs and videos, all those small, banal things nourish her work. For this artist of plural media, the second life of these small nothings evokes an entire imaginary, ranging from the plant register to the animal and human registers. The assembly of these small sculptures recalls rhizomes, leather plays the part of bronze, the combination of fragments of bitumen, cement cores and remnants of rockwork evokes the urban landscape and its many strata, yet all of this sometimes strangely has the air of a marine world. Some will see in it echoes of the absurd and poetic universe of the Surrealists.. Jeanne Susplugas, born in 1974 in Montpellier, holds a degree in Art History from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Jeanne Susplugas chains exhibitions across the world and has shown in venues such as the KW in Berlin, the Villa Medicis in Rome, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Fresnoy National Studio, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, the Musée de Grenoble, and on occasions such as the Alexandria Biennale, Dublin Contemporary or the Festival Images in Vevey. View of the exhibition à bras-le-corps, Béatrice Lussol, Agnès Vitani, June 2023, Galerie Eva Vautier Photo © François Fernandez JOINT INTERVIEW OF BEATRICE LUSSOL AND AGNES VITANI WITH JEAN PIERRE PARINGAUX, MAY 2023 Jean Pierre Paringaux: How would you describe each other’s work? Béatrice Lussol: Among the similarities, I notice the hands in Agnès Vitani’s works, and there are some in my drawings too, where there has been a recurrence of fingers for three or four years. There are also similarities in the kinds of garlands that look like guts in Agnès Vitani’s work, which I too have drawn. This organic relationship creates an echo between us. Agnès Vitani: I discovered Béatrice Lussol’s work, as a visual artist, during my studies at the Villa Arson, with her…
