Carte blanche to Marilou Poncin

In order to strengthen links between the macLYON collection − presented in the exhibition Incarnations, le corps dans la collection, acte 2 [The Body in the Collection] − and young artists, a carte blanche invitation was extended to Marilou Poncin.

Using a range of media including video, installation and photography, Marilou Poncin’s work affords strange, beguiling, and poetic observations and interpretations of women’s bodies and the place they occupy in public space and the media. While the artist plays with or exaggerates various forms of seduction, both visual and psychological, she also provides precise insights into the ambiguity of inter-human relations.
In a multimedia installation that takes over the museum’s circulation spaces like a sprawl of invading rhizomes, she has created a network that connects images of young women, real or reproduced in silicone, and set in fantasised cityscapes. The installation is based on the artist’s research into the canons of beauty that shape urban public space and, at the same time, women’s bodies. In particular, it illustrates the way in which these canons imposed on women can generate new devices, or responses that tend more and more towards the use of artifice.
Echoing a previous series of works entitled happy sad, which consisted of photographic self-portraits in which she made herself up disturbingly as hyper-realistic silicone dolls, Marilou Poncin has produced a new series of portraits where this time she confronts a media personality: Kim Kardashian. Although this icon of reality TV is celebrated for having radically changed beauty criteria, the fact remains that this new norm has simply replaced the old one. Knowing full well that fashionable body shapes and aesthetic codes follow on one another’s heels and are imposed with the same violence, Marilou Poncin attempts to measure her own body against them. By constructing and deconstructing the imposed image and revealing the artifices, of prostheses and make-up in particular, she draws attention to the distance that separates the natural body from the culturally dictated body.