Galerie Quynh is pleased to present Carne Vale, an exhibition of new work by Nadège David and Sandrine Llouquet. The two-person show comprises drawing, sculpture and installation that reveal a poetic dimension to our human condition, through disconcerting yet strangely familiar imagery.

Carne Vale can be literally translated from Latin, according to folk etymology, as ‘farewell to meat’. In the exhibition, the adieu is to the flesh, to our human physicality and materiality. The artists also make reference to Carne Vale as ‘Carnival’, the costume festival of religious origins (where masks are obligatory) occurring before the start of Lent, during which eating meat is prohibited. Providing a visual diary of the tensions between human and nature, and of esoteric and imagined rituals, the exhibition digs into the very core of our existence.

Nadège David addresses the distressing and intense manifestation of the ‘other’ or the ‘elsewhere’ – the ‘unknown’. As during Carnival, when people escape reality by transcending and concealing themselves behind masks and costumes, while impersonating an alternate self, David confronts her drawing process as an evolving, transformative ritual on paper. The ink sinuously flows slowly revealing shapes, and in turn concealing others, developing like an exploration of the unknown and the unimaginable.

Sandrine Llouquet has created a personal syncretism that results from her in-depth reading and research into ancient Greek philosophy, Foucault, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jung, and the exploration of Alchemy, through to the study of religion and rituals – and especially paganism and animism. Her work is “a marriage of the uncanny and the familiar” – Freud's Das Unheimliche – with recognisable images from a variety of different sources combined to create dream-like tableaux.

Although David’s and Llouquet’s processes are essentially opposite – from visualization to intellectualization and from research and conceptualization to visualization respectively – the two artists both engage with notions of transformation, transmutation, and transcendence of our physical being, spawning a skillfully fabricated parallel dimension to our human existence.

Exhibition Dates: June 5 – July 4, 2015

Contact:
Ms. Celine Alexandre (English and French)
celine@galeriequynh.com

Ms. Loan Le
loan@galeriequynh.com

Telephone: +84 (8) 3824 8284