Desire/Palace. Like the work of photographer, videographer and performance artist, Julie Coulon, these two words exist between two languages and demand no translation. For her artist residency with The Invisible Dog Art Center, she brings together a fresh but highly evocative and referential body of work that feels right at home in New York City. Formed at the fine arts school of Paris (Beaux-Arts de Paris), she was particularly marked by a semester abroad at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC. Her work travels well because it navigates the near-global motifs of classic cinema, multiple media, numerous registers and the canonical emotional experiences that mark our lives; namely, falling in love. Cinematic tropes: the cowboy, the sports car, the boxer, the star-crossed lovers...mingle almost to the point of montage to render Coulon’s still images akin to adaptations of classic movies. Between photo and video, the cinematic quality of this show is only heightened. The color schemes, casting, posing and rapport that Coulon cultivates with her subjects brings the 1970’s back to life while revealing a highly erudite sensibility. Finally, prepare yourself for a kiss. Inspired by the collaborations of artist couples, Coulon makes her images with love. Welcome to Desire Palace at the Picto Loft (Brooklyn, NY).

Ask Coulon why she loves New York, and the inspirations that nourish her work are at your fingertips. In the summer of 2022, Coulon made a video featuring two world champions of Thai boxing on a Lower East Side rooftop, perceiving the boxers as symbolic of the stereotypical New Yorker. From an aesthetic and archetypal standpoint, the New Yorker is like a boxer who hustles and pushes the boundaries until they arrive at a culminant moment that leads to their glory. Believing that Coulon really regards every New Yorker as starring in their own movie, chasing a unique and unattainable dream, it is undeniable that these images are made with love. Two years later, and as part of the Invisible Dog artist residency, Coulon continues to cultivate a rapport with her subjects that navigates their cultural and geographic distances. These are the images of the boxer from the perspective of a French photographer, whose own regard reveals tropes which prove to be somewhat transcendent.

With a characteristic self awareness and mirth, Coulon tells me about her visions for exhibiting her work: “when I do a show it’s always in a weird place.” And this time? “This photo gallery is turned into a loft desire palace.” What significance does the location in which you show have for you, Julie? “When I do photos in places, I choose them because they are made of images. They belong between reality and fiction.” In a marriage between the work of art (the image) and the context in which it is both made and seen, Julie’s body of work blurs the lines between “real” life, and the movies.

Julie Coulon interrogates the degree to which our shared experiences are lived through the lens of our cinematic points of reference. How do you represent a reality made of fictions? For Coulon, it is by facing the blurry line between these two terms. Unafraid of the gray area in between representation and abstraction, mimesis and documentation, these works are a treat for the eye and somewhat recognizable to our visual indexes. The aesthetic of Cassevetes’ cinema stimulated much of Coulon’s early images. In her own words,“there is no image of love that couldn’t be pulled from a Cassavetes film.” But with a distinctly feminist and psychological sensibility, Coulon queers the tropes of cinema both in her selection of her subjects and her implication and accountability in the work. In the striking images she made in an abandoned industrial facility outside of Paris, the evidence of staging, posing and lighting are abundant. While these images are cinematic, general, and glossy, the tenderness of her subjects’ embrace, two men dressed in flashy, 70’s tank tops with mop top flyaway bangs, brings the viewer back into the image. A similarly self-reflexive effect can be found in the movie theater series, in which two young women kiss submerged in darkness, their faces illuminated as if by a movie screen, their embodiment inflected by the kisses we are used to seeing on-screen. Film theorists like Laura Mulvey could comment on the scopophilic quality of filmmaking and spectatorship; perhaps more so on the voyeuristic gesture of witnessing an intimate embrace. Here, the spectator is you and Julie – the photographer herself. Coulon’s depictions of the iconic movie kiss do not objectify her subjects; rather, they are a commentary upon our shared aesthetic imaginary.

While the objectifying gaze renders its subject static, it attempts to fix it, Coulon works with movement. A videographer and performance artist (in addition to her photography practice), most recently Coulon showed a sound installation, which she presented live to a group of friends. Coulon then photographed the performance of their reactions in which she takes part. The multivalent, semi-autobiographical project, which celebrates the bubblegum girlhood of a Sofia Coppola film, reveals the intimacy of Coulon’s work. Rather than objectifying her subjects, or reducing them to tropes and archetypes possible in cinema, Coulon walks among them. As in Coulon’s first video ,project, “Kissing in a Cabriolet” (a video featuring a couple kissing for 10 minutes in a darkened tunnel), and “Goodbye to All” (she cast a theater-trained actor to perform a text on New York City by Joan Didion), cinematic influences frolic in contemporary contexts.

Dynamically referential (the viewer can’t ignore the series shot on Sergio Leone’s film sets in Southern Spain, representing at once the artist’s fascination with the aesthetics of iconic cinema, and her emphasis on transnational cultural exchange), Coulon’s photographs are not strictly still either: sometimes they move. Like in the movies, lovers kiss in convertible sports cars. The boxer bounces back and forth across the urban landscape. The cowboys fidget and pose in their color-coded getups. Alongside the photographer’s interest in movement on the levels of content and form, the subjects are also deeply embedded in their setting.

Stella Sappington