CAC Brétigny

“Bascules”
Off-site season 2024—2025
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team (Zélia Bajaj, Milène Denécheau, Léana Doualot, Esther Gobin-Brassart, Elisa Klein, Danaé Leroy, Coraline Perrin, Marie Plagnol, Ekaterina Tsyrlina)

“Booky Palace”
Installation by Jacent as part of the Saint-Germain-lès-Arpajon children's book fair at the Espace Olympe de Gouges

03.03—09.03.2025
Open from Monday to Friday, 9:00-12:00 p.m. and 13:30-6:00 p.m., on Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

            For the Children’s Book Fair, the duo Jacent (Jade Fourès-Varnier & Vincent de Hoÿm) create a comfortable, open and welcoming installation: they bring their living room into the fair. Conceived as a pause in the visit, this space invites both children and adults to sit in amongst the artworks. Second-hand furniture, paintings on ceramic, a soft carpet on the floor, pot plants and children’s books chosen jointly with the book fair team: all these elements brought together to create a liveable exhibition. In presenting their work in a domestic-like space, Jacent tries to break down the hierarchy between the everyday and the artistic by removing the boundaries between public and private spaces. In this way, the artworks cohabit with functional and ordinary objects, which are activated by the visitors.

            In her book L’art en commun, the art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual looks at projects that feed into “a belief that work done on the aesthetic of an everyday object can profoundly transform the tone and intensity of our daily life[1]”. Jacent’s work could be said to share this belief, this joyful desire to offer the community a space that is both pleasant and attractive. In this way, Jade and Vincent celebrate ornamentation and decor, asserting how important it is to pay attention to the aesthetic of the spaces in our daily lives in order to make us want to share them.

            By settling into the space to read, draw or rest, the visitors become true users of the site. Their presence brings the environment to life. They are free to rearrange the space by moving the modular furniture to suit their own wishes and needs. In this way, Jacent’s installation eschews any desire to standardise spaces and, by extension, the way in which we inhabit them. Instead, it’s about collectively defining the uses of a shared space. To borrow again the words of Zhong Mengual, in her analysis of artistic propositions that conceive of “art like something that provides a service[2]”, “the value of use [...] is above all relational: an object’s value depends on the relationship its users have with it[3]”. The space imagined by Jade and Vincent is at the service of the book fair visitors, who are invited to give it value in use by weaving in plural relationships with the objects, artworks and temporary sofa neighbours.

            The title of the exhibition “Booky Palace” is inspired by the theme of this year’s Children's Book Fair: MINUSCULE, gigantic. The announcement of an immense venue (the palace) contrasts with the actual size of the installation within the book fair. The title is also a reference to the reading room and highlights one way the space could be used.

[1] Estelle Zhong Mengual, L’art en commun. Réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique, Dijon, les presses du réel, 2020, p.103. Original quote in French: “d’une croyance que le travail esthétique d’un objet usuel peut transformer en profondeur la tonalité et l’intensité de notre vie quotidienne”.

[2] Ibid., p.105. Original quote in French: “l’art comme ce qui rend service”.

[3] Ibid., p.107. Original quote in French: “la valeur d’usage [...] est avant tout relationnelle: un objet n’a de la valeur qu’en fonction du rapport que ses usager·ères ont à l’objet”.

 

Jacent, duo formed by Jade Fourès-Varnier and Vincent de Hoÿm (b. 1984), creates large-scale installations inspired by their intimate, domestic lives, where the public is received as a guest. Depending on the context, the duo adapt their multidisciplinary proposals that question the experience within an exhibition. They founded Tonus, a Parisian artist-run space that perpetuates this state of mind. Their work has been presented in solo and group shows at Le SHED, Centre d'art contemporain de Normandie (2022), at the Fondation Boghossian—Villa Empain in Brussels (2023), at One gee in fog in Geneva (2023) and at galerie Crèvecœur in Paris (2024).