Introductory text for the exhibition at Galerie Isabelle Gounod

Galerie Isabelle Gounod is pleased to present the first exhibition of the artist Mikaël Monchicourt. A body of work made of detours, gropings and questionings, whose resolution is to be sought in some labyrinthine recess of the mind. The practice undulates, as do the ideas of the artist, who proceeds by assemblage, accumulation, distortion and erasure, combining heterogeneous elements (paint, ink, print, white glue, aluminium, rhodoid, fabric, emergency blanket) to give body to a concentrated image in which chaos becomes formal equilibrium. Mikaël Monchicourt dissects, breaks apart and endlessly weaves links between images, words, their sounds and their shapes, tipping them from the state of symbol into that of matter, physical and palpable, subject to the law of gravity and to flows.

Images and media intermingle and overlap, only to be trapped at last in resin. Thickness becomes flat, compressed, leaving only the memory of its history and its asperities. We see without seeing; rather, we imagine, like an archaeologist reconstructing what may once have taken place on the dig site.

The artist's works are as much the outcome of a meticulous, controlled and conscious practice as of an empirical research made up of chance encounters on Google Images, coincidences and experiments. He questions the circumstances of an image's existence and its distancing, even as he precipitates it beneath a resin that aspires to be unalterable.

The artist thus follows the winding road of his obsessions, turning into a collector of statistics (Le bureau du statisticien, 2014; Stats series, 2021), of letters (Collection de lettres, 2018) and of forms, never hesitating to reuse images from his own works, which he dissects in order to grant them autonomy and enter them into a new inventory (Sans titre series, 2021).

Among the recent works presented at Galerie Isabelle Gounod, the artist deploys for the first time the medium of painting, until now held at a distance, thereby adding a new stratum to his repertoire of forms (Training Line, 2021; Juki, 2021; Système, 2021…). It is not without humour that he winks at art history by applying to some of his works the gilding of an emergency blanket (Elle ne sait pas, 2020; Couturière, 2020), echoing the religious paintings of the Middle Ages that resorted to gold leaf to dispel the darkness. Alongside the large-format works are more intimate series, among them the Stat series (2021), in which Mikaël Monchicourt takes statistics found on the internet, deforms these data by “manipulating” them on the scanner, and shifts the curve from the register of information to that of abstract form. A random line that follows the fluctuations of the material, inviting the gaze to slip into this glacial-looking landscape in which our practices of quantifying the world seem to have come to fossilize.