Rewatch "Entretiens sur l'art" with Pauline Curnier Jardin

Entrusted since 2021 to the critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the "Entretiens sur l'art", which for more than 20 years have drawn up a formidable collection of artists' words, carefully scrutinize the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the invited artists.

Of the work of Pauline Curnier Jardin, one could begin by saying that it is visually abundant.

The photographs of his last two exhibitions (which took place at the MHKA in Antwerp and at NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film, Aalst) evoke bouquets of giant flowers, eccentric circus tents, carnivals parades, huge nativity scenes, and peep-shows where fairy tale-inspired performances would take place.

They show an art that is profoundly oriented towards celebration, ritual, an excessive art that brings great joy, an emotion that the artist recently explained as "a political driving force". Films, drawings, installations, sculptures, performances and so pose worlds whose balances she reinvents at each exhibition, accompanied for several years by Rachel Garcia with whom she creates increasingly sensational scenographies. 

In an interview with the artist published in May 2025, the art historian and author Mathilde Roman identified four, namely "the eroticization of bodies, pornography, cross-dressing, emancipation." We could extend the list, with terms that often overlap: feminism, exploration of desire, and a whole range of empowerment methods. As a major exhibition of Pauline Curnier Jardin entitled "Virages Vierges" opens at the Palais de Tokyo, your visit will notably focus on this alliance between maximalist formal stylization and political coherence, an association that for nearly twenty years has been the living heart of his work.