Gwendoline Perrigueux

Artists, dancers, and free spirits know it well, busy as they are making the night fall faster; a night where stretching time to infinity, tracing serpentine loops and living together as a constellation is still possible. Such is the desire, and the landscape, drawn by Gwendoline Perrigueux’s sculptures and installations: with her, everything often starts with a party, with its sensual energy and its random encounters. We, who were invited to penetrate her immersive environments, did not attend that party. It does not matter, because what the artist offers us is precisely something like its raw essence: its incantatory vestiges and its gestural constellations, inscribed in the heart of indexical forms left open to our own activation.
 
Thus, rather than reorienting the capitalist signs of a post-industrial world towards the field of pleasure, the artist reaffirms the will to detach oneself from it entirely. The party, this finished party or perhaps simply waiting for activation, is a promise of emancipation. It is this threshold where everything can change dramatically, where the community of bodies can be reformed, where the alternative worlds can be invented –through a whole range of affects that are still unclear, and which come up to us, concealed, to better go through us.
 
Extract from the text of Ingrid Luquet-Gad for the exhibition “Tout feu tout flamme”, She Bam! Galerie Laetitia Gorsy, Leipzig, 2021
 

Gwendoline Perrigueux prefers the sensitive experience of the event to the theoretical approach: how we come together, how we form a body. After having focused on the idea of celebration through various installations and exhibitions such as “Pousses d’été” or “Cream corn”, she now seems to be asking the question of pleasure, including sexual pleasure, in a broader sense. The visitor moves around as if in expectation: a video unfolds in front of an empty receptacle, a soundtrack echoes in the space and various textiles that look like clothes hanging on a hanger seem to be waiting to be seized. The theatrical tension, this tension of what could happen, appears in the artist’s work in a new way: we are no longer immersed in the décor of what was once a party, in layers of confetti or in the remains of a drunken evening, but in the dawn of enjoyment. The looped explosion of confetti balls in video does not send us back to the melancholy of a moment that is disappearing, but to a cycle that questions our relationship with the present and has to do with the awakening of the senses.
 
As a way of recycling her own pieces and feeding her work, the artist has designed a paper made from the fibres of confetti from a late night party and pieces of glass, giving it the texture of a skin and a vaguely glittering appearance. One should not be afraid to approach the pieces to better grasp them, to apprehend the contrasts of the material, for example between the coldness of steel and the warmth of flesh colour, or between the rigidity of metal and the suppleness of elastomers. The pastel colours used by Gwendoline Perrigueux keep us in an intimacy full of fantasies where the drama of desire and the gaze is replayed. The shadows underline the human forms of certain sculptures; torsos, backs or even arms and legs like an exploded body. We fixate on details, sensations, like fetishes and this slightly surreal crystallization makes us look twice at Velvet Lashes. Velvet lashes, a soft whip, the ambivalence of the words and the associations of materials make us see trouble.
 
Extract from the text of Henri Guette
The Steidz, 2019
 
 
MORE INFORMATION:
 
// Biography
// Press review
// www.gwendolineperrigueux.com
 
EXHIITIONS:
 
// Velvet Lashes (02/02-03/09/2019)
// Fluffy Wink (01/28-03/04/2023)