For the main sector of Paris Internationale, Galerie Derouillon will present a new set of works by Mathilde Albouy (French, b.1997), Julian Farade (French, b.1986) and Vojtěch Kovařík (Czech, b. 1993). The booth will bring together a set of new works produced especially for Paris Internationale 2024, emphasizing multidisciplinarity: installations, sculptures and paintings. The 3 artists have been brought together because their practice addresses, through different forms, contemporary questions about gender, new kinds of narratives, and the representation of violence.
Informed by feminist science fiction, Mathilde Albouy uses the fictions generated by her pieces as political tools to challenge an established and binary reality. We are not sure whether the encounter with her sculptures is an act of seduction or predation. By hijacking scales and materials, objects - sometimes sharp or toxic - become individuals in their own right, characters in new narratives. Albouy reveals how the beauty of so-called feminine objects conveys prejudices and patterns of oppression.
Vojtěch Kovařík draws on the strategies of national socialist art, using the same logic of simplicity and clarity, but replaces the glorious workers with a pantheon where the Greek gods are crushed by the weight of their symbol. Today, Kovařík makes violence-laden myths his own, particularly those concerning women, and questions their fundamental representation in Western culture. Without sublimating or trivializing it, the violence in his paintings is no longer merely symbolic, but gains in contemporary relevance. Beneath the paint on Kovařík’s canvases are also hidden phrases, like invisible incantations, which transform them into an emotional landscape, like an allegory of his own life.
There is a performative relationship to the act of painting in Farade’s practice, which he sees as a hand-to-hand encounter with the canvas. The vibrant figures - the usual crocodile, bird, grid, ovoid grapes, etc. - are signs of a new vocabulary invented by the artist. Farade seeks to transcribe the immediate force of an emotion through straightforward line and color, tracing open jaws, claws and hands capable of grasping us. Farade’s practice is nourished by a rage described in the writings of Audre Lorde or bell hooks, rooted in a specific post-colonial context of struggle against racism and misogyny.
Together, they point to the gap between the ideologies and myths we and our culture have inherited, and the ways in which these perpetuate patterns of oppression. They seek to deconstruct what is authoritative, to dismantle grand narratives in order to make room for the traces of individual mythologies and give them new relevance.
Although they are emerging artists, Albouy and Farade already have institutional recognition, and have shown their work at the Collection Lambert, FRAC Corse, Istituto Svizzero Roma, 19M Dakar and the Boghossian Foundation. Kovařík, for his part, enjoys more established support, with works in numerous international museums and collections (Musée d’art Moderne de la ville de Paris (FR); LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art (US); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT); K11 Musea (HKG); Fondation Lafayette Anticipations (FR); The Rachofsky House collection (US)) and two solo exhibitions has been dedicated to his work in 2024 at Power Station (Dallas) and at the Kampa Museum (Prague).
