CRÉPUSCULE

Giulia Manset

Crépuscule

Opening reception: Thursday 5 September, from 6 to 9pm

Exhibition: September 5 – October 12, 2019

The new Giulia Manset exhibition “Crépuscule” (Dusk) at Galerie Virginie Louvet is structured around this period after sunset when the glowing sunlight lends varying levels of illumination to the atmosphere. The artist wanted to harness these few hours of dusk’s uncertain luminosity. The failing light of day creates mystery making it difficult to distinguish friend from foe, true from false. Clarity gives way to a realm of darkness, doubt and dreams.

Giulia Manset focuses on interstices, moments of uncertainty and transformations. She draws us into a strange world, one inhabited with chimera in hybrid surroundings, changing nature engulfing the viewer in the looming night.

“I’ve always been somewhat contemplative and a bit of a dreamer. Creating art is therefore a pretext for me to dream. Recurring gestures and repetitive patterns in my work enable me to enter a meditative state in which my mind wanders throughout extraordinary worlds.”

The artist examines modern man’s relationship with nature, the lasting impression that he leaves wherever he goes. The landscape takes on somewhat disturbing, composite vegetation, animal-like, spider web forms: bejewelled cages closing in on us without seeming to. Nature may be essential to man yet the reverse is not true.

Alluding to the central panel of Jérôme Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, in this exhibition the artist incorporates figures in Genesis that herald Paradise Lost…

“I chose to use a colour scale with artificial citrus tones, “the colours of faded flowers”. Each piece consists of inseparable sculpture drawings that overload the perception of the images. There is a dichotomy between an initial aestheticizing impression of the artworks at first glance and a certain underlying violence. I wanted to create ambiguous, unclassifiable, crude and meticulous objects that are simultaneously cages and jewellery…”

The phenomenon of the inherent power of nature stirs a mesmerising authority in Giulia Manset’s work in which the artist is submerged and engages her peers in a night with no tomorrow.

“I am particularly fascinated in nature. I try to capture its innate creative force and extraordinary energy in my work. For several years my work has been a premise of a timeless time. Duration is at the forefront in all I create. The time to produce a piece is often as long as the subject addressed is impermanent. I immobilise a moment in my pieces, an image that crosses my mind. My hands are busy while my thoughts are already elsewhere.”

Born in 1986, Giulia Manset lives and works in Paris, France.