As Alice falls into the depths of herself in Wonderland, the narrative becomes a metaphor for the physical and psychological transformations of childhood.
It is through the most fantastical images that the full complexity of reality is expressed. This is how the work of Laura Bottereau & Marine Fiquet can be interpreted, as a long, continually re-examined dive into the world of the White Rabbit, on the border between apprehension and attraction, anxiety and scopophilic pleasure.
Bottereau & Fiquet is a rising French artist duo working in Nantes, whose works offer a theater of the uncanny. For example, the white wax votive offerings in their piece *Spleen Spring* , with their prominent teeth or mustache hairs, elicit a smile. These are small pieces of cut-out body parts and skin, carefully hung like a trophy wall, but through laughter, the viewer validates and identifies with these morbid dismemberments. In * Les vieux démons* (The Old Demons ), children's games transform into a deliberate parody where faces are masks, hands and feet fetishistic accessories, and the central figure of twins establishes the theme of simulacrum. Fragments of bodies and fragments of actions recur throughout the artists' installations, sculptures, and photographs, flirting with the grotesque. Childhood – the main theme of the artists – then appears as blocked before the mirror stage, or in a utopian state, where the body is not understood as an independent and localized unit, but only through its relationship with the subjects and objects that surround it.
However, nothing innocent is at play on the part of these artists, whose conceptual and referential discourse allows them to engage with a multifaceted visual culture, fostering fruitful interpretive possibilities. In their stagings, references to fetishes and ex-votos imbue objects with a certain magic, a different kind of power. In the photographs, a still-life impression detaches the bodily evocation from its reality, transforming it into a site of metaphorical projection. In some installations, conceptual photography seems closely related, combining texts and images to construct individual narratives. In Soliloquies , the approach is reminiscent of Sophie Calle's work, tinged with an added touch of whimsy.
The duo presents the bodies "as political archives": is this a way of evoking memory and the physical inscription of psychological events? But no doubt there are as many interpretations as there are children's stories.
Photo credits :
1: Bottereau & Fiquet, Summer Seum (excerpt) ©Adagp, Paris, 2024. Photography: Grégory Valton
2 (left image): Bottereau & Fiquet, Spleen Spring (excerpt) ©Adagp, Paris, 2024. Photograph: Grégory Valton
3 (right image): Bottereau & Fiquet, Elle & L. (excerpt) ©Adagp, Paris, 2024
4: Bottereau & Fiquet, Transi · e · s (excerpt) ©Adagp, Paris, 2024
