Giulia Manset

Exhibition : March, 18 – April, 27, 2016

Opening : Thursday, March 17, 2016 – 5pm to 9pm

The notion of instability is the premise of all my research. Tengential balance is my focus, and particularly some elusive forms of geography in a world normed by grid patterns, leading me to journey into untamable territories. Glaciers, as ever-moving landscapes, are a symbolic form that allows me a deeper consideration, beyond the purely geographic component, into an equally unstable psychic topography.

I leave my studio and venture off into lands as blank as the sheets of paper I leave behind. To experiment a sort of void, of physical solitude. I choose to push forth into the timelessness of a given environment. I walk in a desert of ice. The soil cracks underfoot, all around me is emptiness, I go forth into the fog. Progress is grueling and solitary, pushing me to my limits and awakening in me some primitive force that allows me to create.

For me, artistic expression is akin to polar exploration. Both similarly compel one/me to go beyond one’s/my own limits, to confront the unknown, to face danger and to learn to get lost.

The current exhibit, Un monde flottant, created for the Galerie Virginie Louvet after a trip to Iceland, is an opportunity for me to showcase the pioneers of the Far North, symbols of the most extreme “adventure”. My approach is prompted by a search for extraordinary and unpredictable events. Two sculptures and my last series of felt pen drawings on photographic paper are witnesses to those extreme experiences.

Giulia Manset, Février 2016

There a hidden scheme to the order of nature and it must be respected… An anthropogeographic approach could help us make it somewhat legible. A Thule Inuit does not whistle, as that would be a way of stealing the dynamic of the air, which has its own significance. Thus do we discover with those hunters, step after step, a sacred geography, which they are able to detect thanks to their particular sensory perception. It comes from higher up. Indeed, there is a cosmodramaturgy, sustained in their minds through the oral reading of one to two hundred myths. Some recent research by neurologists has shown that more developed neuronal faculties exist in those peoples than the ones at our disposal. Their dendrites are always on the alert, which gives them a very subtle cognitive perception, which, alas, is no longer available to us. That immediate consciousness of an invisible external reality, to which contemporary artists sometimes have access, allows them to distinguish, on the vast stage of the Far North, some energy spots and, who knows, perhaps fields of electric or magnetic impulse that escape us.

Jean Malaurie, excerpt from L’Allée des baleines, Fayard, coll. “Mille et une nuits”, Paris 2003

Giulia Manset was born in 1986. She lives and works in Paris.

Download here the Press release