Emma Stern — Almine Rech, Paris
At the Almine Rech gallery, Emma Stern entraps us in dreams of leather and metal, reimagined in the cyber-organic, synthetic, and artificial era of a society where the body itself has become ornament.
Flirting with guilty pleasure and trapped in a kitsch devoid of superego, this unfiltered ode to the plastic ideal of a world dreaming of grand, Instagrammable nights—while also drawing its new epic ideal from normality—uses shock as its greatest weapon.
Between seriousness and the grotesque, her seduction dares and imposes an unexpectedly genuine naïveté that overturns the codes of propriety and joyfully plunges into a nearly pop-like transgression of delirious fantasy. More than that, the merging of technical prowess and schoolyard imagination creates an imbalance and fragility that resonates like a cry for help—a vulnerable expression of an imagination ensnared by its own representations.
Playing out her fantasy between post-apocalyptic visions and scenes of bureaucratic romance loaded with clichés, Emma Stern’s canvases accumulate references and symbols drawn from a consumer culture’s narratives. Here, the plastic coldness of the staging contrasts with the fragility of translatable emotions. Power dynamics and relations of domination leap out only to blur and implode into fear.
As if claiming the stigmas of a culture that confines them, her heroines turn their objectification into a tool of emancipation—one that sees them revel in an augmented freedom. And in the end, it is the freedom of desire that finds expression in the infinite care given to the representation of these curves—so charged with norms that they become a mirror in which to hang our lost dreams, extending them for a fleeting moment to better exorcise their destructive determinism. Time and the pressing need to aspire to a just society may have scorched our lofty ideals, stripped away our childish romantic wanderings; yet still remain those images, those sensations filled with the very void that gives rise to them—images to which, through her relationship with flesh and the plasticity of affect, Emma Stern continually brings us back.
And guilt, like the whirlwind imposed on values here, seems to turn on itself—ultimately giving way to a cheeky innocence, with a raised finger in our honor holding up the entire scene.
Emma Stern, “Hell is Hot,” Almine Rech Paris, Turenne, April 26 — June 7, 2025, 64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris
