Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Art writer & translator | Lecturer & PhD candidate

Virginie Yassef

Exhibition review published in Flash Art (Milan), no. 262, October 2008, p. 139.

“La seconde est partie la première” (The Second Departed First) is the title of French artist Virginie Yassef’s show at Jeu de Paume. Like the global title – which was extracted from a newspaper and which lost its original meaning and gained some mystery in the transmutation – the different pieces on display seem to belong to different worlds that are elusively interconnected in the exhibition space.

In the video projection Alloy (2007-2008), a child, like a despot, plays with geometrical and magnetized forms that he moves and assembles in many configurations, while a voice-over relates the galactic misadventure of two cosmonauts. Along with the accidental collapses or intended dispersions of the child’s constructions, the astronauts experience sudden changes in space and time that lead them to death. In the projection room, a geometrical module has been enlarged to a monstrous size, so as to half-obstruct the viewers’ gaze.

In the back, two yellow futurist windows (Airedificio, 2008) open onto another room inhabited by a large wooden elephant surrounded by handmade ‘Crate Chairs’, after designer Gerrit Rietveld’s model: Pour le réveiller, il suffit d’un souffle (It Only Take a Breath to Wake Him Up, 2008). Like a Trojan horse, the elephant lets out mysterious sounds through its imperfect joints and suggests something clandestine hidden inside, while the viewers are actually allowed to sit on the ‘Crate’ reproductions.

Finally, contrary to the handmade chairs, an Ikea bookcase, Billy Montana (2004), is entirely filled with shelves, one color per shelf that the artist painted herself. Useless as a piece of furniture, the bookcase becomes somehow a unique design item.