Palais de Tokyo is happy to present the first retrospective dedicated to Cathy de Monchaux, a major figure of the British art scene, including more than fifty works dating from 1984 to today. 

The exhibition pulls us between epidermal desires and dangers, bringing together technical drawings, archives of destroyed works, sculptures and installations—vertical or horizontal, on the wall or on the floor. The artist unsettles our points of reference, particularly those of the phallocratic order of philosophical and artistic language: a ‘privilege accorded to rectitude […] to the symbolism of the phallus and, at the same time, the reduction of woman to matter-matrix, to mother, to vagina-uterus”.

It is also a play of dimensions, from the intimate to the demonstrative, as well as of materials, from the grain of velvet to the chill of metal, which lacerates our vulnerabilities to rekindle their power. 

A clinical perspective may dissect folds, lead, dust, tracing paper, lacework of rivets, straps, marble, orifices, fairy-like vulvas, interlaced unicorns and frogs that swarm through forests of rooted bodies, where trees protect the opacity of landscapes.

There are also many references present: minimalist thought, gothic impulses (the Victorian era) with cryptic details, romanticism, symbolism, the forests of Shakespeare and Paolo Uccello, invisible beliefs, battles and science fiction. Titles attest to the artist’s writing practice, each carrying its own distinct resonance: “Never forget the power of the tears.”

Her more recent work emerges in bas-relief like a backlit imaginary world, suspended between the urgency of dazzlement and the invasion of panic within a fractal universe: vines are roots that are bodies that are souls that are struggles that might also be imprints to be healed. Composed like battle paintings, these works also engage with depth and new perspectives, articulated through negative space.

Here we find armies of unicorns that directly echo the artist’s earliest work, still present in her studio as a protective totem, which she created as a student. A skeleton functions as an armature, recalling the traumatic memory of a car accident in which the artist nearly died, followed by an accident involving her horse. One might imagine that at that precise moment her wounded imagination was formed, where structures simultaneously support, bind and oppress.

The artist’s sculptural work is that of the great small difference—the displacement that renders sensuality threatening and fear hypnotic. Sorrow is never far away, beneath the prickly armatures, fossils, memories, prostheses, fetishes; beneath the surface of bodies and feelings.

In search of an intimate, political and collective emotional overload, Cathy de Monchaux’s work kneads forms as it does emotions, until it leaves this lingering taste in our eye: that of metal under the tongue, a place where one might even gather oneself in contemplation.