Marion Chaillou | Both Ways

The Galerie Jousse Entreprise is delighted to announce Both Ways, Marion Chaillou’s first solo exhibition at the gallery running from 15 May (opening 4pm-9pm) to 14 June 2025. 

“Image-verbs” say everything and reveal little. I’m reading this. I’m eating this. I love her. I’m drinking that. I’m watching this. I’m friends with him. I’m sleeping with her. I’m doing this. I’m going there… – or else, nowadays, I’m staying put.
Like many generation Y-ers or Z-ers, Marion Chaillou regularly takes photos with her mobile phone of everything and nothing, recording the here and now of her daily life. Some of these photographs, recognisable through their rather characteristic subjective point of view, are chosen for their pictorial potential or affective value. The artist transposes them in the form of small watercolours on paper, whose dimensions remain similar to images that we see on the screen of our phone.
Mounted on carefully crafted mini wooden frames, these paintings truly flesh out and occupy space – despite their miniature size – on the wall or placed onto/into a medium. The dexterity of their creation clearly conveys the pleasure taken in making them.

There is nothing exceptional about the images that these little paintings show us. These artworks draw their power from the sheer amount of them and from the familiar banality that we recognise in what they present to us and what they remind us of. Among these memento mori, Marion Chaillou sometimes also sketches scenes that express something more personal, for those able to detect them. In this way, their intimacy, nevertheless exposed for all to see, remains solely entrusted to the artist’s loved ones.
The size of these works and their subjects appear to highlight the fleeting nature of moments, their accumulation, the sum of that which comprises a life, with all the most insignificant, remarkable, banal or beautiful things it contains.

In addition, and not as a parallel activity, Marion Chaillou creates works on wood sometimes used for her paintings. These can adopt the form or be similar to interior furniture. The artist reveals how the furniture that fills our domestic spaces can form discussions based on whether or not gestures, contact and information are shared, dictating gendered dynamics or power relations.
The eighteenth and then nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of furniture created to respond to specific and individual needs: the secrétaire style of writing desk for the serious business of the man of the house, the bonheur-du-jour for the impassioned missives or love letters of the lady.
With virtuosity and a sense of humour not lacking in critical flair, Marion Chaillou works on various types of wood to subvert, pervert or queerise^[1] aristocratic and bourgeois furniture made up of confidants’ seats, secret rooms and hidden compartments.

For her first exhibition at the Galerie Jousse Entreprise, the artist variously represents several works made of wood and fabric that seem to draw their inspiration from schoolgirls’ skirts or the leather-fringed undergarments worn under the armour of ancient Greeks and Romans.
Further on, something resembling a pair of trousers, again made of wood – seen from the back, proffered to us? frontally, staring us down? – leans nonchalantly against a wall. Two other pairs of legs, intertwined on the floor, rework the system of nesting tables or simulate an erotic act of cruising in which the participants are apparently still partially clothed.^[2] The hieratic aspect and suspended motion of these artworks do, however, conceal Trojan secrets.
Hidden drawers and other concealed openings that we sometimes discover through dubious actions^[3] can give us a glimpse of the paintings. At other times, these hiding places remain invisible, definitively obscuring their use and their secret content.

In both painting and sculpture, Marion Chaillou likes to play on ambivalences and ambiguity. Her practice aims to disrupt binary perceptions and certainties. Both Ways could be an answer to a great deal of questions, reminding us that, sometimes, different paths lead to the same place, obliterating illusions or the burden of choices, and that occasionally we can get to our destination through a third way, or a previously unsuspected path.

Ana Mendoza Aldana

Ana Mendoza Aldana is a curator, art critic and poet. She has devised, organised and produced stimulating and sensitive exhibitions for over twelve years, often taking literature as their starting point. Feminist and queer questions and practices, as well as painting, have a special place in her work. She develops a form of art criticism that borrows its typographic games, musical forms and narratives from poetry.

^[1] Queer, in the sense of rendering “bizarre” or “unsettling” but also with the idea of bringing these artworks into the heterogeneous constellation of what might constitute a queer art.

^[2] A form of chatting up in homosexual milieus, characterised by anonymous encounters in public places (beach, woods, roadside rest areas). Through its evocative potential, this artwork reminds me of a previous work by the artist: Maquette pour Glory Home(2024), a wooden work reproducing a double S-shaped seat, of the type shared by confidants, with holes, inviting them to use the furniture as a prop for polyamorous sexual practices.

^[3] One of the artworks reveals its interior by passing a hand “under the skirt”.

Vernissage : 15/05/2025 12:00 am