Entretiens sur l'art with Pauline Curnier Jardin
Entrusted since 2021 to critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the ‘Entretiens sur l'art’ (Interviews about Art) series, which for over 20 years has built up a formidable collection of artists' words, will from now on be looking closely at the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the guest artists.
When discussing Pauline Curnier Jardin’s work, one might begin by saying that it is visually exuberant.
The photographs from her two most recent exhibitions (held at the M HKA in Antwerp and at NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film, Aalst) evoke giant bouquets of flowers, eccentric circus tents, carnival parades, immense nativity scenes, and peep shows where fairy-tale-inspired performances might take place. They showcase an art that is deeply oriented toward celebration and ritual, an art that is excessive and brimming with joy—an emotion the artist recently described as a “political driving force.”
Films, drawings, installations, sculptures, and performances thus compose worlds whose balance she reinvents with each exhibition, having been accompanied for several years by Rachel Garcia, with whom she creates increasingly sensational scenographies. In an interview with the artist published in May 2025, art historian and author Mathilde Roman identified four of them, namely “the eroticization of bodies, pornography, cross-dressing, emancipation.” One could extend the list with terms that often overlap: feminism, the exploration of desire, and a whole range of methods of empowerment.
As a major exhibition by Pauline Curnier Jardin titled “Virages Vierges” opens at the Palais de Tokyo, the interview will focus in particular on this alliance between maximalist formal stylization and political coherence, a combination that has been at the very heart of her work for nearly twenty years.
