Julie Coulon (MFA Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2020) draws from the aesthetic canon to display this erudite, pictorial lexicon. Her feminine gaze includes the fixations which haunt figurative depiction from Renaissance Painting to New Hollywood. Through multiplicitous homages in both moving and still formats, the artist seeks to capture the liminal space wherein love transforms into violence and vice versa, across iconic motifs like the fist-fight, the movie kiss, or the fleeing couple. “Strangers May Kiss,” Julie Coulon’s first solo show, invites the viewer to cross the screen into a story told in technicolor where life itself is like a movie.
Cultivating a mystery around these cult images which make up the collective imaginary, Julie Coulon interrogates the turning point in which moment and gesture become cinematographic. In so doing, she reveals all the artifice of her careful “mise en scènes:” in 16:9 format and under the oblique light of projectors, “off-camera” is never far away.
In 2018, studying at the New York School for Visual Arts, her gaze shifted. The enduring pertinence of these cinematic images is revealed in the face of “reality.” The artist admits, our lives are more imbued with the visual landscape and language of cinema than they are not. But how to represent a reality made of fictions? Unafraid to dive into ambiguity, the artist intentionally avoids the beaten track and presents a space in which “real” and “fake” mingle, coexist and materialize in unison, in utter rejection of any and all preconceived notions. How do we know whether the figures embracing before us are acting, if they are truly a couple? How do we know that Pasolini is dead, when we can see him walking on a beach in Naples? Without a doubt, resulting from her long meditation on her subjects, Julie Coulon’s work also effaces the border between her “real” life and artistic production. Her subjects maintain their personal lives, which she keeps in mind and realizes by inviting them to reenact their lived experiences.
Julie Coulon meditates on her images to the point of haunting, her films a promising continuation. It’s with these aesthetically pleasing images, riddled with visual references and iconography which reflect contemporary social problematics, that the artist seeks a pinhole through which light is pleasantly refracted onto her subjects. Her works delicately address, in the guise of fiction, our fears, our desires and all that is unspeakable.
“Strangers May Kiss” makes and unmakes our connections to imaginary, fantasmatic and unfulfilled lives, reducing them down while melting the viewer into a soft, loving and pliable putty where Coulon’s works illustrate the singular desire that we all share: that of images.
Jeanne Burin DEs ROZIERS + TRANSLATION STELLA SAPPINGTON