Julie Vayssière

Julie Vayssière was born in 1979 and lives and works in Paris (FR).

Julie Vayssière quietly and sinuously creates a world of images and stories where characters and places remain frozen in an eternal regret, when they are not simply silent, inconsistent. They become interesting by their autonomous tendency to talk about nothing in particular but to discourse on our society, which constantly shifts its focus on desires that are never fully satisfied. The overlooked figures of advertising and commercial desire are Julie’s preferred protagonists: losers (or winners: in any case, it doesn’t matter) of TV game shows, probable buyers of suburban houses, Sunday shoppers in peripheral furniture stores, students skipping classes in shopping malls… Places of artificial desire, of feigned joy: they here take on moribund tones, sporting sorrowful smiles. And the texts, cruel without touching, with a threatening neutrality, in the style of Houellebecq or Douglas Coupland, sculpt, trim, and uproot the dreams and hopes, the lives and troubles, of humanity with a capital H. The devices are often simple, poor. They reject the spectacular because they speak of its failure, yet still declare, and this is essential, the possibility of living anyway.