Jeanne Vicerial
Avant de voir le jour
On the occasion of the first edition of Contemporaine de Nîmes, Jeanne Vicerial is exhibiting her works alongside those of Pierre Soulages at the Musée du Vieux Nîmes from April 5, 2024.
The Museum of Old Nîmes is the setting for a posthumous pairing between emerging textile artist Jeanne Vicerial and the celebrated painter who recently passed away: Pierre Soulages. The painter’s research was particularly important to Jeanne Vicerial. Upon discovering his work, she realized that black, when combined with repetitive gestures, opens infinite possibilities. For it is not about black in the end, but about light and doors to other worlds. In this unprecedented face-to-face encounter, Jeanne Vicerial pays tribute to the master in the city where he passed away. Several of their works engage in dialogue within a multisensory installation she created entirely on site, and which required her to live in the museum for a month with her team and fashion students from High school Ernest Hemingway in Nîmes. The experience is as much about rebirth and metamorphosis as it is about the state of anteriority that precedes birth, the last memory before life begins. Feminine presences and Outrenoirs punctuate this journey from white to black and back again, highlighting the many parallels between the two artists’ practices. The threads and furrows created by the brush sometimes appear to interchange. Here, they embody both the passage of time and the fragility of destinies.
Présence
Catula, Présence
Étude anatomique : fibre musculaire d’une Présence
The artist
Born in 1991, Jeanne Vicerial lives and works in Paris. Her passion for clothes design began when she was a teenager. After studying costume design then obtaining a master's in clothes design at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs in 2015, she started a research project which resulted in a Sciences, Arts, Creation and Research PhD. Her thesis, defended in 2019, questions the mechanisms at work in the design of contemporary clothing and proposes an alternative to the made-to-measure/ready-to-wear dichotomy associated with fast-fashion culture. She took her research further by teaming up with the mechatronics department at MINES ParisTech to develop a patented robotised process for producing made-to-measure clothes with no waste. She also chose an artistic path which led her to work with Hussein Chalayan and then found research and design studio Clinique vestimentaire. In addition to producing her own creations, she has quickly established an array of partnerships with artists working in different fields, including photographers, sculptors, performers, choreographers, musicians and perfumers. Jeanne Vicerial was the artist-in-residence at the French Academy in Rome, at Villa Medici, in 2019-2020. Her work has been widely shown, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), Villa Medici and Palazzo Farnese in Rome (2020) and Collection Lambert in Avignon (2021), and was recently included in the Centre National des Arts Plastiques collection in Paris.
