Julien Creuzet — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 20 → May 12, 2019

Julien Creuzet — Palais de Tokyo Le Palais de Tokyo présente jusqu’au 12 mai une première exposition personnelle d’envergure du jeune artiste Julien Creuzet (né en 1986) ; fragile en son fond, le parcours se perd autant qu’il nous perd dans une accumulation qui échoue hélas à mettre en valeur l’œuvre présenté.

“dim lights of distant stars LEDs of warning lights indulge, lamp post embers that burn wings, mad sacrifice of the light butterfly, twilight phantom from before the birth of the world (…)
it’s the uncanny, I must have been gone too long that place far away, home is in my black-dreams it’s the uncanny, strangled words while drowning, I howled alone underwater, my fever (…)”
is the beginning of a poem, a first-person litany, of a voice that soon doubles up and multiplies. It’s also the title of Julien Creuzet’s solo show at the Palais de Tokyo

This exhibition will come alive in the form of secular pop songs. A deep-sea landscape in a plastic pool. An unaccentuated rhyme illuminated by a bluish light, turning around on itself. A parrot glitching with a guitar on its foot. A melodic meandering along jagged shores. An array of ragmen’s stalls at the Croix-de-Chavaux market. A breath and a riff. A choreographic score derived from a Dogon ceremony. Sirius B rotating to the beats of Afro-house. Caroline zié-loli, Papa Djab, Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine’s severed head. A cockpit arena on Place de la République. Without forgetting a hairless dog with ironcoloured pixelated flesh, both a wily spirit and a conveyer between worlds. Or not.

Curator: Yoann Gourmel

“With an exhibition, you can tell a story and this story can take on the form of a fiction. […] I tend to offer visions, and work out a fiction when I start thinking, and create forms, while putting different forms into a relationship, or a way of navigating… I decide how I want things to be seen."

Julien Creuzet is a visual artist, video-maker, performer and poet. Via environments made up of composite series, he explores different cultural heritages by organising passageways between imaginaries of elsewhere, the social realities of here and now, and forgotten minority histories. By associating different temporalities and geographies, and preferring anachronisms and collusion over the simplicity of established tales, Julien Creuzet evokes registers of life and technology, history and myth, poetry and politics, to deploy disparate stories of hybrid creatures and swampy zones repossessed and contradicted by imperious civilisations’ desires for power and expansion.
Born in 1986 in Blanc-Mesnil, Julien Creuzet lives and works in Fontenay-sous-Bois. He has been given several solo shows, including recently at the VR Arles Festival as part of the Palais de Tokyo’s off-site exhibition during the Rencontres d’Arles (2018), at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard and Bétonsalon — centre d’art et de recherche (Paris, 2018), the gallery NaMiMa at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Nancy (2016) and at the Frac Basse-Normandie (Caen, 2015). His work has also been presented in a large number of group shows: “Aujourd’hui aura lieu”, the Palais de Tokyo’s off-site exhibition during the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), “A Cris Ouverts”, the 6th edition of the Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d’Art Contemporain (2018), the Rencontres de Bamako, 11th Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017), the 14th Biennale de Lyon (2017), at the Frac Pays de la Loire (Carquefou, 2016) or else at La Galerie, Centre d’Art Contemporain (Noisy-le-Sec, 2015). He is represented by the Document Gallery in Chicago.