For her first solo exhibition in the main space of Galerie Derouillon, Mathilde Albouy creates an environment featuring a new series of lacquered wood sculptures, most of which are filled with wax tinted in a river-green hue.
Entering “Lucky You” feels like stepping into a gothic heroine’s bedroom or being drawn to the edge of a nixie’s pond (river nymph). Mathilde Albouy’s world is similar to ours but slightly askew. As if it were transposed into dark wood, soaked in ink; some surfaces gleam, others are almost sticky. A world of shadows that the artist likes to refer to as a swamp comes into being. Sinuous, expressive lines bring the works to life—they seem to move, evoking the vibrant lightness of dragonflies. For Albouy the swamp is a fictional place of origin, the source from which her works emerge.
The sensuality of cursive forms and shiny materials in Albouy’s work emphasizes the physical relationship induced by sculpture: "I think of sculpture as an erotic gesture," the artist confides. The creative process involves an extreme proximity to materials, constant touch, researching tactility sensations, textures and substances. For poet Audre Lorde, “eroticism is a resource present in each of us, on a deeply feminine and spiritual level.”* By allowing erotic power to be expressed, sculpture becomes a vehicle for agency—echoing the quest of art historian Lucy Lippard: “I was looking for ‘feminist art’. I was looking for sensuous, even sensual, abstraction, an off-center, three-dimensional imagery…”.**
Mathilde Albouy draws inspiration from science fiction. The green wax that fills the doors and drawers recalls the strange, corrosive substance found in the Zone of the novel Stalker by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972). For philosopher Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2016) allow for a disruption of reality. When forms, materials, or “absences” seem to possess a foreign agency, they challenge our way of inhabiting the world.
Albouy is particularly interested in feminist science fiction, which often opens up the hypothesis that another world is possible. Her Widows are wall-mounted sculptures with a box-like structure. Their title hints at the shape and function of windows, while also nodding to the figure of the joyous widow in gothic literature. Trapped in an architecture where patterns unfold like dark lace, she is in mourning, yes, but perhaps emancipated from patriarchal order now that her husband has gone.
At the center of the exhibition, a stripper’s platform takes on the form of a carousel, introducing the notion of play as a catalyzing force of the exhibition. Mathilde Albouy builds a stage that allows for different games of perception. The setup suggests a series of scenarios where seeing also means being seen. Eyes appear as a recurring motif.
A screen is pierced with peepholes or glory holes, while a diamond-shaped eye allows the exhibition to be discovered like a secret. The stripper’s platform is inspired by a lived experience that resembled for her a troubling dream, where beauty, fear, and seduction coexisted. The piece I see you (III) combines ocular forms and breasts. Here, sculpture is not just a desirable object: it looks back, reversing roles, the viewer is exposed.
The title of the exhibition, “Lucky You”, references games, risk-taking, and chance. It carries a pop, playful dimension, with an allusion to the neon signs of 1970s strip clubs. The tension between play, seduction, and danger permeates the entire exhibition, where each piece lures you in.
Mathilde Albouy creates a field of bouncing gazes that recalls our contemporary condition of surveillance and constant exposure, reinforced by social media, where everyone can be observed while observing others. For Albouy’s work, the image of a pinball comes to mind. The engineer and theorist Steve Mann describes this democratization of surveillance with the term ''sousveillance'', or inverted surveillance (shared control). This critical perspective is paired with a feminist one in Albouy’s practice, desire can be reappropriated: her staging allows the desiring gaze to be reversed.
Oona Doyle
*Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978.
**Lucy R. Lippard, « From Eccentric to Sensuous Abstraction: An interview with Lucy Lippard by Susan Stoops », in More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., 1996.
