Anita Molinero — Bouche-moi ce trou — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 16 → September 9, 2018

Deployed in the air, above the landing of Palais de Tokyo’s main staircase and its surrounding space, the installation conceived by Anita Molinero is made up of a large sculpture of burnt polyfoam, a kind of fossilised planet or spaceship with hesitant technology. Like a mute “guardian”, a chained sculpture covered with fur watches over this aerial scene with its urban apocalyptic, Z-movie appearance.

For over thirty years, Anita Molinero has been exploring the fundamentals of sculpture: fullness and emptiness, matter and volume, weight and mass, while focusing on the irreversible energy of gestures and improvisation. Objects taken from everyday life and the heteroclite materials she retrieves (bins and plastic or resin urban furniture, polystyrene, synthetic foams, toys, car parts, packaging, assorted trash…) are worked-on using a flamer to produce varied, proliferating forms. Carbonisations and undulations, gaps and swellings, effects of crystallisation and blossoming thus appear on the shrill surfaces of these ordinary materials, in a tense balance between form and formlessness, between the resistance of the material and the expressiveness of gestures.

The transformation of these materials from the industrial world plunges us into a universe comparable to that of the science-fiction films which the artist enjoys, not so much for their catastrophe scenarios as for their sets and special effects. She thus uses the term “form-fictions” to describe her mutant works. Nor they offer real narrative resolutions neither an illustration of social or political commentaries concerning excessive consumption or ecology. Through the exhibition of their precarious states, through their formal inventiveness, through their sometimes obscene violence as well as their jubilatory humour, they impose themselves as witnesses of the tumult of the modern world.

Commissaire : Yoann Gourmel