galerie anne barrault

We last saw the artist on stage, in a striking performance: balancing a car on her head, her face concealed behind a hyper-realistic mask of Angela Merkel, Vimala Pons engaged in a complete and slow strip-down – layered with an abundance of clothing – while delivering in a long monologue the memory of a former chancellor’s heartbreak.

Abundantly praised, shared, and commented on, this astonishing scene remained one of the most memorable moments of the theatrical year. But beyond the astonishment, it wasn’t the technical and acrobatic performance that lingered in memory, nor the unexpected talent of the artist as an impersonator or her absurd humor that swept the audience into laughter. What resisted and surpassed by far the spectacular scope of the event was the existential chasm that opened before us: this elusive and grotesque chimera that occupied the stage, baring itself in chaotic and unstable urgency, shared with us a profound, metaphysical solitude – that of learning desire, the gaze of the other, and the absence of response to that desire. The exhibition of the artist’s body and expertise camouflaged, in reality, an intimate dive into the expression of inner desolation.

The dramaturgical journey undertaken and the scenic setup deployed to lead to this emotion remain one of the most unexpected and singular trajectories we have witnessed on stage. This exposure, through its radicality and singularity, extended other equally mysterious and elusive ones that have punctuated the history of art: from Pina Bausch to Marina Abramovic, passing through Francisco Goya and Marcel Duchamp.

Today, through a different language than that of stage performance, the artist’s imaginative deployment continues: Vimala Pons invests Galerie Anne Barrault with a series of very short videos, hung like paintings on the walls of the exhibition space. Each frame of these videos comes from image bank catalogs, the content of which is produced almost industrially and consists of highly colorful, moving images, shot in short focal lengths, and initially made for commercial purposes – primarily advertising.

This imagery of repetitive stereotypes (about heterosexual couples, the corporate world, or the family unit…) is initially produced to provoke a desire for purchase or consumption, by incorporating promotional montages for a commodity or ideology.

By revisiting, through text, music, and editing, this imagery of consumptive happiness of a Californian middle class, the artist offers a grimacing and hallucinated reading. She, in her own way, haunts the artificiality of situations, reinjecting into them everything that the production mechanism has evacuated: the irrational, desire, doubt, neurosis, and trauma.

The vacuity of promotional setups becomes here the backdrop of a fragile, desiring, and delirious humanity, where the narrative of the narrator collides in a maelstrom of inner voices: consumerism, cruelty, mass entertainment, joy, narcissism, and the death drive. Between lettrist cinema 2.0 and theater of the absurd, Vimala Pons momentarily leaves performance to become a videographer and enters the images as she enters her characters: by intrusion.

By Clément Cogitore

Personal show of Vimala Pons

From April 27th to June 8th, 2024