Amie Barouh, Chloé Quenum, L’argument du rêve — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard
At the Fondation Ricard, Amie Barouh and Chloé Quenum play with the foam of dreams, at the edge of memory, unfolding their ethereal installations, as different as they are strangely complementary. Curated by Élodie Royer, The Argument of the Dream explores the reality of dreaming as lived experience and as a reservoir of meaning capable of connecting diverse sensibilities within the fragmented condition of the world.
Here the real collides with fantasy, even with aberration, diverting the images of others and the forms of others in order to imagine new ones. Amie Barouh superimposes her own footage onto images archived by the creator Gim Furtuna, weaving a set of shifting strata analogous to the fragmentary density of dreams. Chloé Quenum, for her part, unfolds a delightfully strange bestiary where cultures that integrate the plasticity of dreaming into their systems of normalization encounter artificial intelligence, where traditional aesthetics and artisanal appearances confront technology in order to inhabit anew a space that becomes a chamber of alternative visions of reality. The spatial presentation of aphorisms by the thinker Mohamed Amer Meziane, grounding his reflection in a fundamental contradiction similar to that of the dream state, a « metaphysical anthropology » that openly acknowledges the intangibility of any examination of the human condition, ultimately completes the exhibition’s variation around a line of thought that draws from dreams their essential singularity.
An inner urgency becomes the essential driving force behind these creations. From the energetic line of the joyful dream storyboards by Barouh, which are traversed more than they are read, to the frontal impact of the printed formulas of Mohamed Amer Meziane, where words, even more than letters, form the motif and strike against glossy paper, to the multiplication of media and techniques in Chloé Quenum’s practice, where titles and forms unfold a cartography of her research while above all inventing a sentimental vocabulary of transparencies and influences whose inspiration can be savored at every moment.
Diffuse lights, sonic pulsations, reflective or matte surfaces compose an atmosphere in which perception precedes interpretation. In a trompe-l’oeil effect, the window overlooking the riverbanks, so identifiable within the exhibition space, is truncated by a video insert and doubled within the room. Within this circulation, the works establish a kind of floating syntax, an organization of sensations in which each element acts as a sign without a pre-established code. Like dreams, which articulate images and affects without ever fixing their logic within a stable vocabulary, the exhibition path composes a grammar without language, made of echoes, shifts and fleeting correspondences, where meaning arises less from explanation than from their very arrangement.
From that point on, subjective experience becomes the mode of a learning process that no longer concerns the content of meaning but the acceptance of the impossibility of containing it. Moving from the anxiety of excess toward the quietude of a relinquishing to which it invites us, the exhibition transforms spontaneous energy into a serene reflection, asserting its capacity to give rise to ideas rather than claiming to reflect the platonician Idea.
Above all, it affirms a remarkable coherence despite the radical diversity of its media, managing to articulate the proximity of the mental universes of two compelling artists in their singularity while even disturbing the very nature of their apparent unison. No geographical distance, no temporal gap can resist the suspended moment of sleep. There is therefore nothing human that the possibility of a dream cannot welcome.
Amie Barouh, Chloé Quenum, L’argument du rêve, February 17 to April 18, 2026, Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, 1 cours Paul Ricard, 75008 Paris. Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm, Wednesday until 9 pm
