Naomi Gilon
RÊVER D’OMBRE
ET DE LUMIÈRE
08.JAN.2025
Dreaming of light and shadow
RÊVER D’OMBRE
ET DE LUMIÈRE
08.JAN.2025
Dreaming of light and shadow
The monsters-monstrare-creatures, the souls that live in objects. The beast is still roaring under the bonnet, and the object is no more than a skin, a moult before it hatches into the world. Today, we can still see all of the surveys of his research, which never ceases to contaminate space beyond the tangible. Her figures are on the edge of the common-collective mass-culture, intimate chimeras in perpetual gestation in the body, expressed through the forms that Naomi specifies with great acuity. They threaten to exorcise themselves from our imaginations, Alien-style. We are unwilling hosts to creatures of which we are the product, which haunt us as much as we ignore their effects.
Hands are a recurring theme in Naomi's practice, and when they first appeared they acted as structures for other objects, rather like the paws of animals supporting the weight of bourgeois furniture. They seem to be the direct embodiment of the hands I would have imagined as a child reaching out from under my bed to attack my jugular vein, and yet no representation left such a clear trace of their form before Naomi brought them to life-these hands had already invaded our collective imaginations, figured in hollows in them, hands themselves amalgamations of the various details represented through mainstream or niche cultural goods; none of which are as faithful to our dreams as the hands of Naomi's creatures. And as in the best horror films, the hands suggest the creature that we fail to depict too accurately, subjugated just enough not to give it a face: to give it life and risk recognising ourselves in it.
And today, it's the baby shower. It's an opportunity to take a closer look at the characters that come to life on porcelain, who in turn hold up a mirror to our own contradictions. The baby, the porcelain, the very fragility and gestation of the monster or the creation of its innocence; as with the magical girls: the magic works, it becomes real, it intrudes into everyday life and brings its new version to the world. A kind of powerful LSD.
Beneath the enchantment of the objects, an invitation to dream for the world. It's a gymnastic exercise in identification and resistance, designed to stimulate our collective imagination beyond contemplative ceremonial. To dream again, concretely, to transform the platform that brings us together today, to displace our social shackles, to reconquer ourselves in representations other than the roles we are assigned outside of it. To allow ourselves to encounter these living figures, to embrace their ambivalence.
Through these various characters, Naomi invites us to embrace our fundamental ambiguities, for in them lies a vibrant force, the multiplication of our dreams, and our reasons for acting on them. These paradoxes require us to fully embrace our own contradictory truths—
the truth of light
and shadow
the truth of my solitude
and my connection to the world,
the truth of my freedom
and my servitude,
he truth of my insignificance
and the sovereign importance
of every living being,
of all living beings
the truth of life and death
—
a§s
a§s
Naomi Gilon, Le Pierrot, paper porcelain with pigments and transparent glaze, fired at 1230°C, frame in tinted Meranti multiplex, porcelain dimensions 8.4 × 12.5 cm, with frame 21.4 × 25.4 cm, 2024
Naomi Gilon, L'Arlequin Alchimiste, paper porcelain with pigments and transparent glaze, fired at 1230°C, frame in tinted Meranti multiplex, porcelain dimensions 8.4 × 12.5 cm, with frame 21.4 × 25.4 cm, 2024
Naomi Gilon, Les Siamois, paper porcelain with pigments and transparent glaze, fired at 1230°C, frame in tinted Meranti multiplex, porcelain dimensions 8.4 × 12.5 cm, with frame 21.4 × 25.4 cm, 2024
Naomi Gilon, Le fou visionnaire, paper porcelain with pigments and transparent glaze, fired at 1230°C, frame in tinted Meranti multiplex, porcelain dimensions 8.4 × 12.5 cm, with frame 21.4 × 25.4 cm, 2024
Jimmy Gilon, production and shaping of the wooden scenography elements
A multiple is being published to mark the exhibition: choose which of the characters best represents you according to the characteristics described by Naomi, and ask for your copy of her card.
ANALOG PHOTOS Eléonore Bonello & Delphine Schockert
Cards and exhibition text printed by Eléonore Bonello
Bar provided by Eléonore, Tilde and Renaud
Flowers donated by Renaud
Analog photos door Delphine Schockert