Les Crieuses, Maman
Alice MONNERET
March 28th - May 17th, 2025
Michel Rein, Paris /1st floor
Installation views
About
With the GENERATION cycle, we offer young artists, through their first gallery exhibition, the opportunity to present their vision of a changing world.
« Sometimes in art school, you get the impression that you’re witnessing a defining moment in what you think will become a real artist’s work, assumed and taken in hand by a curious and resolute young woman - possessed, dare I say it? And indeed, it seems to me that Alice Monneret’s work today is asserting its presence, deeply rooted in a culture of trouble, the occult, beliefs, powers (of women), made up of powerful, embodied rituals that play out - and worry - on so many scores written and played by her, with mastery! »
Véronique Terrier Hermann
Art historian, Nantes Fine Arts School
Alice started in Rome the series that is showned today for the first time to the public and who goes by the name of Les Crieuses, Maman. The series depicts women from her close circle, mingled with dreamlike, vegetal landscapes straight out of what she calls herself speculative feminist narratives.
« Imbued of supernatural, my pieces are inspired by mythological figures, religious beliefs and ritual practices, which I freely interrogate and freely transform, driven by the desire to re-enchant the world by a mutant reality, where the boundaries between the visible and invisible dissolve. »
Beyond her techniques, which blend different materials to the point of confusion, she entangles family narratives with fantastical universes, ritual protections (embodied by runic alphabets) with proliferations of invasive abstractions (fluid forms contaminating the body of her work). These are organic, sprawling visions, stitched to her personal life, which she maps in the narrow bed of a powerful flow, unfolding a universe of occult references, where gentle vegetation rubs shoulders with bestial violence, and organic matter is peacefully transformed into colorful bulbs.
In her more abstract work, such as Murmures Nocturnes or Fish soup, the infinity of details, the compositional movements reminiscent of Japanese painting or psychedelic drawing, the suppleness of shapes and colors give her work a bewitching depth, creating a visceral bond with the viewer, as if it were living matter constantly renewing itself.
Generosity is one of the traits of this obsessive artist, who works her pieces like illuminated trances, and who has also been noticed by artists such as Pauline Curnier Jardin, who recently wrote to her about this first Parisian exhibition in our gallery:
«May this exhibition make you queen for good,
may your ferny purple tint all the cauldrons,
And, solid,
And tumbling,
As if shod in white concrete,
You dance, you dance, you dance and laugh, you explode,
You scratch and scratch and scratch and veins appear,
It’s wood,
It’s you,
It’s wood, it’s you
The queen of the show. »
Colin Ledoux
March 2025
