For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Derouillon's main space, Mathilde Albouy unveils an ambiguous theatre, composed of a new set of works—a troubled space in which one moves forward without certainty, guided only by the clues she chooses to let surface.
The question of desire, imbued with the thought of Audre Lorde, for whom the erotic is a creative force, occupies a central place. The sculptures specifically created for this new exhibition become places of tension, where desire, power, and control are continually tested. Thus, the wooden and wax coffers, titled Widows, stand in the gallery space like thresholds. Their title evokes both loss and the persistence of a feminine figure who survives, bearing memory, freeing herself from the structures that once held her.
This shifting space can therefore be understood through the lens of a quest—the quest for feminine identity. In this sense, Mathilde Albouy reinterprets the ideas of Claire Kahane in her essay Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity (1980) on Gothic literature, where the heroine moves through unstable architectures that reflect her own search for emancipation.
In this theatre of forms, desire becomes a battleground, and fiction a means of reclaiming narratives. Mathilde Albouy’s work does not seek to deliver a univocal message: it opens a space where desire, survival, memory, and ambiguity overlap—an space where one can never be certain whether they are moving towards the light or into shadow.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Oona Doyle.