explicite lyrique — Marcelle Alix Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in about 2 months: January 9 → March 1, 2025

“I have lived within a lyrical poem, like anyone possessed.” Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Skin hunger. Sometimes it seemed that my skin ached like an empty belly. The fine hairs below my navel seemed to reach up, wanting to touch something. My mouth would open when I slept and my tongue would push at the air, reaching, reaching. I would wake from dreams of rising like yeast into an embrace that welcomed and satisfied that hunger, an embrace I wanted desperately.” Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature (1994)

The first exhibition at the gallery, “Moon Star Love” (14.11.2009–23.01.2010), outlined less of a program than an atmosphere and a way of working together—confronting our subjectivities and harmonizing like two instruments that would now play together. The exhibition “explicite lyrique [explicit lyrical]” marks 15 years of Marcelle Alix by celebrating the inclusion of a third subjectivity: Florence Bonnefous and the program of Air de Paris. Thus, we continue to imagine the gallery as a space for sharing and discussing, and the exhibition as an expression of friendship.

Dorothy Iannone, Untitled Flower Arrangement, 1962 — Pastel on paper (from a notebook of the artist’s drawings) — 35,7 x 24,6 cm — Vue de l’exposition explicite lyrique, 2025. Marcelle Alix, Paris Photo : Aurélien Mole

Isabelle Alfonsi: Thanks to you, Florence, I met Dorothy Iannone when she exhibited her work Story of Bern at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris (3.06–10.07.2016) and I was able to discuss with her the powerful nonconformity of her work, where explicitness radiates as a synonym for equality, where the joy of making art is inseparable from the expression of freedom. When we began exchanging ideas with Cécilia about what this exhibition could be, I wanted to bring Dorothy Iannone closer to Dorothy Allison, tireless advocate for women’s emancipation (from their origins, from compulsory heterosexuality) and spokesperson for pro-sex and lesbian feminism. The works of both Dorothys convey a defiant spirit that I hope will shine through in our display. From Sarah Tritz’s miniature theatrical sets as mini stagings of body-toys, to the umpteenth remake of Nights in White Satin by Romain Grateau’s cavernous voice, to Ethan Assouline’s dialogue with a Marxist baby, the invited artists love to manipulate references to excess, as winks to their “friends of the past.” (1) Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Microphone Piece, which opens the exhibition, draws a queer artistic lineage from John Cage’s Silent Pieces (2) to Aérea Negrot, a musician and a performer with whom the artists have collaborated multiple times. The communities we form with the living and the dead, present times touching the history of art and contributing to its writing—all of this makes the spirit of a gallery.

Florence Bonnefous: From the outset, I’ve believed that this exhibition is about love. Of course, when we speak of love, we often think of shared happiness and joy. But love also walks alongside terror and pain. Immense pain, so often repeated, that crushes and kills for 2,025 years. We see this pain in Dorothy Iannone’s bruised women and in Brice Dellsperger’s drowned-suicided-transvestites, embodied by the beautiful Lupe Vélez, Carole Landis and Linda Darnell, revenants of Hollywood-Babylon. I believe that this exhibition is about lOve. But also about umOr. The seismic, absurd umor of Anne-Lise Coste, who welcomes us with a small FRANÇAIS FRANÇAISES with big ears and LA GIFLE, the quintessential 70s romance. The love and practical umor displayed by Monica Majoli in two charcoal sketches from 1992 which may evoke early strap-on experiences—not always easy to stabilize, not always fitting, as Dorothy Allison recounts in another story. (3) And we come to hands—or rather, gloves. Bruno Pelassy’s butcher’s glove, with chainmail; Gyan Panchal’s farmer’s glove, with castration rings. Blood, semen. And animal brain, spread on Pierre Creton’s large drawing sheet. The EXPLICIT is sprayed by Coste with an airbrush in one word: SEX.

Anne-Lise Coste, BBR (Français Françaises), 2023 — Felt pens and Ecoline ink on canson paper — 21 x 29,7 — Vue de l’exposition explicite lyrique, 2025. Marcelle Alix, Paris Photo : Aurélien Mole

EXPLICITE LYRIQUE [EXPLICIT LYRICAL] is also a missing work: Maia Izzo-Foulquier’s performance video, nonetheless present for me in this exhibition. At the very bottom, blending with the burning passions of Dead Can’t Dance’s seraphim, I can hear the highway traffic outside Marseilles harbor. No one notices the slender body in a corset and heels, spray-painting the words WHORE AND PAINTER — on a large screen leaned against the wall like a streetwalker. “What do you want? — Love. That’s not a job…” (4) That’s why I need you to listen, whispers Lou Fauroux’s exhauSt-pipe-Mask in black. Thank you for the invitation, to friendship, love, and joy!

Gyan Panchal, La Semeuse, 2022 — Glove for hydrocarbons, castration ring 33 x 15 x 3 cm — Exhibition view ’L’ivraie’, 2022. Marcelle Alix, Paris Photo : Aurélien Mole

Cecilia Becanovic: I already imagine an exhibition with dramaturgy as thrilling as the photomontages of Hannah Höch, who opened her heart to these “wandering and extravagant beauties that obligingly enrich our fantasy” (5) and channeled all the energy, empathy, and political will necessary to bring her vision to life. This ‘photo-matter’, stripped of pretense, confesses, as Anne-Lise Coste does, a desire for love and connection so powerful that it is impossible to turn away from it. We don’t talk enough about friendship and love in public, even though, as bell hooks (6) invites us to, we could collectively ask ourselves what we lack and what might make us feel good. Thank you for the silence, dear Pauline and Renate, and thanks also to those who create with others, sustaining the conversation as they have for years. Discussing, in order to build community. Working toward an emancipation of the heart. Revealing oneself through a reciprocal gift that enhances the other’s value. This is what I see in this first collective sculpture by Georges Juliette Ayrault & Louis Chaumier. Love is what is made there; these imaginations and works are placed in the middle, between us, rushing to meet our emotional needs. Jean-Charles de Quillacq, through carefully reframing gestures, manages to humanize these women holding up fish in an erotic magazine—a context that is, above all, about power. In a world where sexist masculinity claims no emotion, the positive self-assertion I also see in Zohreh Zavareh’s work—like in Hannah Höch’s—operates through a fantastical realism that allows her to connect with her true identity. This exhibition is a way to recharge and feel heartfelt connections at work.

Come have a drink in the limbo. Here, the threshold is not between body and soul. Time and blood drip onto our fingers, Awaiting the prodigious flower of pleasure.

(1) Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Salomania, self-published zine, 2010. (2) Art critic Jonathan E. Katz suspects these pieces are a tribute to John Cage’s lifelong intimate relationship with Merce Cunningham, at a time in the United States when it was preferable for male couples not to acknowledge their relationships publicly. (3) Dorothy Allison, “Theory and Practice of the Strap-On Dildo,” 1985, in Skin. (4) Freely adapted from a line by Isabelle Adjani to Lino Ventura in La Gifle (1974) a film by Claude Pinoteau. (5) “Whenever we want to force this ’photo-matter’ to yield new forms, we must be prepared for a journey of discovery, we must start without any preconceptions; most of all, we must be open to the beauties of fortuity. Here more than anywhere else, these beauties, wandering and extravagant, obligingly enrich our fantasy.” Hannah Höch, “On Today’s Photomontage” in Stredisko 4, no. 1 (6) bell hooks, All About Love, 1999