23.05—02.07. 2016
 

Press Release:

Clearing up certain misconceptions

The Refrain of the Kitchen People (1) is an essay in the visual arts that posits the gesture and the body as fundamental units of measurement in our perception of time and space and the construction of our relationship with our social, affective, and productive surroundings. Starting from the kitchen, understood as a defined domestic space with its own consecrated social and productive uses, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier creates a setting in which objects function as much as autonomous artistic creations as archetypes incorporated into a broader cultural fiction to have emerged from the artist’s imagination. The biographical component – the way she transfers productive gestures from the studio to the kitchen as she takes on her reproductive role as woman and mother – is here simply a clue intended to hint at the concrete origins of the decisions taken by the artist to shape the work during the production process. The partition/window that stands between open/closed and occupied/empty spaces as if in reference to women’s separate spaces, the works that move from the floor to the walls and onto plinths with a sort of Mediterranean nonchalance, the weavings produced by a man in a far distant country, the utensils for chopping, flattening, absorbing, holding, and sharing, are all concrete translations of age-old social and formal divisions, played out here in the medium of sculpture and installation.
 

At a key moment in our period in history when a crisis of humanism (2) is forcing our civilisations to define a new shared vision of the human being and the individual, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier’s art sheds opportune light on both the evolution ad the atavism of our relationship with our daily symbolic and gendered rituals. It posits the cultural not as a series of oppositions, but as the potential for an organic, intersectional relationship with our surroundings.

Dorothée Dupuis, May 2016.

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https://www.fondation-pernod-ricard.com/fr/expo/la-ritournelle-du-peuple-des-cuisines

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