Louise Mutrel — École municipale des Beaux-Arts, galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Louise Mutrel — Starlight Express Club @ Edouard-Manet de Gennevilliers Gallery from January 20 to March 14. Learn more Born from a photographic series and a book created during her residency at Villa Kujoyama, the exhibition recreates the sense of wonder she felt upon first encountering these machines. Fleeting and fragmentary, that discovery called for deeper immersion ;an exploration of the stakes embodied by these enthusiasts who are willing to devote their lives to the metamorphosis of a truck.

Yet Louise Mutrel takes side roads, diverges, and brings forth parallel, ambiguous moments. The everyday stands alongside the fantasy of a monumental sculpture inspired by another popular symbol: the mecha, the humanized robot that has shaped the imagination of Japanese animated and graphic productions. By diverting the initial gesture of self-display, the Starlight Express Club parcours conveys the visual ambition and symbolic power of a production economy that, despite its rigor, does not renounce spectacle.

The gigantism of the dekotora is expressed here through the massiveness of raw crates, whose luminosity and chromatic richness transform the right angles and shadowy corners of the white cube into a creative playground. Garlands, star-shaped lanterns, and ornamental chains (like pieces of jewelry) contrast with the bitterness of kerosene, turning these trucks into ornamental objects to be shared like a secret.

By playing with contrasts—the softness of a rococo-style redesigned cockpit against the coldness of the road, the whimsy of personal accessorizing against the technical rigor of driving—Louise Mutrel recomposes works that are almost classical, inhabited by fragments of a reality already steeped in fantasy.

In the half-light of an exhibition room resembling a residential interior, the crates cast their glow and fill the space with their humming, unsettling an otherwise comfortable intimacy. Their bulk and incongruity compel detours, inviting the visitor to formulate enigmas that seem destined, like these mechanical creatures romanticized by human desire, to find resolution only through the invention of other objects, other relationships to aesthetics.