Precious Okoyomon — Galerie Mendes Wood DM
At Mendes Wood DM, Precious Okoyomon establishes an atmosphere oscillating between innocence and threat, one that tests the heart and imperceptibly unsettles bodies. The pastoral setting collides with metal; creatures indulge and suffer at will, while the environment itself abandons its role as mere backdrop to become an active agent of this troubling opacity.
Through naïve drawings repeated across wallpaper to the point of saturation, and sculptures that magnify children’s toys as symbols of globalization, nostalgia and anxiety merge into a succession of tableaux that disrupt established orders and could easily tip into terror without ever fully succumbing to it. Driven seemingly by a desire for protection, or by a decision to sustain the irresolution of a reality that never settles, the exhibition places the viewer—more than the works themselves—under an experimental gravity. The spectator is frequently relegated behind barriers (fences, panes of glass…), which enforce a mediation between this oneiric realm and our own bodies.
This constant tension between enchantment and danger also inscribes itself within a conception of the living as a historical battlefield. For Okoyomon, nature offers no refuge: it bears the scars of a violence that mirrors our own, theirs as well, etched into the very ground we tread. In its own way, it renders visible this paradoxical ensemble we inhabit as much as our representations; it even amplifies what domination has sought to mute—desire and anxiety.
Thus, it remains unclear whether the fire in the eyes of these teddy bears, whose softness has been withdrawn from us, signals desire or the terror of attack, or whether it might be the reflection of the apocalypse evoked in the exhibition’s title. Nor do we know whether the childlike sensuality of these figures, poised at the limits of what can be shown, constitutes a liberation or an act of contrition. What we do sense is that perhaps we have no place here, and that our responsibility might be not to interfere—having proven ourselves incapable of forging a world without power struggles, without the cost of our own destruction. Even when they seem to offer themselves to us, it becomes clear that our respective worlds remain hermetic.
A world that, in its flight, Precious Okoyomon ultimately calls into question, equipping vegetation and its fantastical beings with the means to repopulate it and to put an end to what restrains them. The pleasure is troubling, yet it appears to commune with a nature that watches over them as much as it accompanies them.
Luxuriance thus becomes a form of resistance, perhaps a revenge, and, in any case, an alternative to our system, one that breaks its continuity. Over the course of this striking exhibition, it sketches a powerful in-between space where tongue and languor compose a desire that darts and traces, and through the doubt it imposes upon us, outlines a horizon of life all the more intense for having relegated us behind its fence.
Precious Okoyomon, It’s Important to Have ur Fangs Out, 20 October–21 December, then 5–17 January 2026, Mendes Wood DM Gallery, 25, place des Vosges, 75003 Paris
