Zoé de Soumagnat
Zoé de Soumagnat is an Astérides Resident in 2014.
A deckchair, a wall, a postcard. A stack of magazines on a coffee table, the measurement of a male mannequin’s leg. A trendy colour palette from 2013—or just as easily from 1951. A Hawaiian sunset printed on recycled paper. A plastic pear lying on the gallery floor, being kicked around by a five-year-old. An assistant picks it up, wondering whether to put it back in place, or just leave it where it landed.
One way to approach the work of Zoé de Soumagnat would be to consider her interest in different forms of mobility. How can a painting travel from wall to wall, through a museum or a suburban home? How can a motif or gesture migrate from an Egyptian tomb to a 19th-century vase, and then onto a New Wave album cover? How does the image of Van Gogh’s sunflowers end up duplicated on posters and T-shirts and beach towels and birthday cards and fridge magnets and credit cards and canvas bags and planners and mouse pads and silk scarves?
There is something theatrical here, where the act of showing becomes narrative. One must examine the staging of spaces and paintings—the museum, the reception room, the foyer, the display case, or the magazine’s double-page spread—and uncover the shared compositional strategies at work (one might just as well speak of window dressing). In Zoé de Soumagnat’s work, the repetition of a botanical motif—a stylised banana leaf or a pineapple—spreads across various surfaces, replayed in paintings, painted walls, textile patterns, etc., empty and arbitrary like the stain left by a crushed centipede on the wall of the plantation house in La Jalousie, by Robbe-Grillet. And as we circle around these signs (we surround them and they surround themselves), they become suspicious—potential omens, frivolous and inconsequential. But perhaps not only that.
Indeed, there is a kind of attitude at play here, one open to pleasures without purpose as well as the everyday failures that populate the world of aspirations like a cloud of insects. Small pleasures come with small stings, potentially just as delightful or corrosive as each other. What kind of experience—different or similar—do I have in front of a Gauguin painting or a Hermès perfume counter? How do Philip Glass and Clams Casino find their way into my experience, and how do they follow me? And if this starts to look like a cartography of consumer Epicureanism, then that’s fine. Let’s just remember that pleasures and political opinions are sometimes just as hard to tell apart as painting and décor—and that may not matter, but perhaps not only that.
Text by Lee Triming, 2013
Translation: Triangle-Astérides
Zoé de Soumagnat’s work is on display during the exhibition Enfin la résidence !, 2014.
