HCMC – Exhibition “Carne Vale” by Nadège David and Sandrine Llouquet

Opening: Thu 04 Jun 2015, 6 pm
Exhibition: 05 Jun – 04 Jul 2015
Galerie Quynh

From the organizer:

You are invited to “Carne Vale”, an exhibition of new work by Nadège David and Sandrine Llouquet. The two-person show comprises drawing, sculpture and installation that reveal a poetic dimension to our human condition, through disconcerting yet strangely familiar imagery.

Carne Vale can be literally translated from Latin, according to folk etymology, as ‘farewell to meat’. In the exhibition, the adieu is to the flesh, to our human physicality and materiality. The artists also make reference to Carne Vale as ‘Carnival’, the costume festival of religious origins (where masks are obligatory) occurring before the start of Lent, during which eating meat is prohibited. Providing a visual diary of the tensions between human and nature, and of esoteric and imagined rituals, the exhibition digs into the very core of our existence.

Nadège David addresses the distressing and intense manifestation of the ‘other’ or the ‘elsewhere’ – the ‘unknown’. As during Carnival, when people escape reality by transcending and concealing themselves behind masks and costumes, while impersonating an alternate self, David confronts her drawing process as an evolving, transformative ritual on paper. The ink sinuously flows slowly revealing shapes, and in turn concealing others, developing like an exploration of the unknown and the unimaginable.

Familiar images cross with eluding shadows, as in her series La Communauté des Sentiments (2014) where realistic faces gradually dissipate/recede behind a black veil of Chinese ink, giving way to the formation of organic shapes as if their entrails were becoming visible. The darkness of uncharted and unfamiliar territories seems to envelop all, until it erases any trace of our physical being. David gives shape to the ‘farewell to flesh’, where human flesh is progressively replaced by what is left: the nucleus of its invisible essence and our animalistic, biological nature.

Sandrine Llouquet has created a personal syncretism that results from her in-depth reading and research into ancient Greek philosophy, Foucault, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jung, and the exploration of Alchemy, through to the study of religion and rituals – and especially paganism and animism. Her work is “a marriage of the uncanny and the familiar” – Freud’s Das Unheimliche – with recognisable images from a variety of different sources combined to create dream-like tableaux.

Llouquet explores ritual transformation and the transmutation of reality, which is composed of archetypal imagery. By juxtaposing recognizable elements with strange and eerie surroundings, Llouquet, much in the same guise as a psychologist, hypnotist or guru, stimulates the deepest recesses of our unconscious and memory. Drawings in the shape of mandalas mounted on plinths stand solitary in the exhibition space, pointing to the sky, as if maps of both the unconscious and the starry void, or visualisations of ceremonial predictions and trances. Recurrent characters populate her scenes, faceless, masked, half-animal. Referencing myriad ritualistic and cultural traditions, the compositions exude an illusory higher knowledge of the world and of our place in the universe.

Although David’s and Llouquet’s processes are essentially opposite – from visualization to intellectualization and from research and conceptualization to visualization respectively – the two artists both engage with notions of transformation, transmutation, and transcendence of our physical being, spawning a skillfully fabricated parallel dimension to our human existence.

ABOUT NADEGE DAVID

Born in 1975 in Poissy, France, Nadège David received an MA in Political Philosophy at University La Sorbonne, Paris, and an MA in Contemporary Political Philosophy, University of Paris VIII. She was a lecturer in Sociology at University Marne La Vallée between 1999 and 2005. The artist lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

David’s first solo exhibition, Experience sweet and relaxing dreams, was held at Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City in 2007. In 2014, she presented Ho®s-Sol (Soil-Less®), her first solo exhibition at Galerie Quynh.

ABOUT SANDRINE LLOUQUET

Born in 1975 in Montpellier, France, Sandrine Llouquet has lived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam since 2005. She graduated from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche – Villa Arson in 1999.

Llouquet’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions that include the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; and Tate Modern, London. She has also participated in a number of biennales with Vietnam-based art collective Mogas Station, such as the Shenzhen Biennale (2007), the Singapore Biennale (2006) and in Migration Addicts – a collateral event of the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her drawings, objects and videos are part of private collections around the world.

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