Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain has asked Caroline Young to curate the second edition of Carte blanche for a collector. She has chosen to showcase the work of a young French artist, Camille Goujon, whose work deals, through a self-analytical approach, as much with her aquatic and transformational obsessions as with the eternal topics of life, sex, and the quest for the self.
Dessins animés (Cartoons) presents a series of watercolour paintings and inks, two cartoons and a sculpture, all divided in five sequences: idle hands, multilingual, this is a pipe, pleasure pump, and grotesque gravidity. Each of these works has been conceived dialectically, in the sense that the double entendres and how the artist plays with images, give way to new intentions. Humour, a key element in Camille Goujon’s work, allows her to disguise worrying messages, giving them a new strength, as well as the possibility of transforming them into denunciations.
The anthropomorphic sculpture-model echoes Duchamp’s work Étant donné: 1º la chutte, 2º le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). This landscape woman’s sex, presented to the spectator without any sense of modesty, is protected here by a chastity belt and by a dam that retains all liquids; the gaslight is fed by the power plant that releases smoke from its animated breasts.
Fosile, hydraulic, nuclear… energy is omnipresent in Camille Goujon’s work in the shape of derricks, water towers, dams and power stations, as a series of erotic symbols. Human industry has transformed the landscape into a celibate machine. Under the earth, geology is there to be consumed. Camille Goujon happily sucks this matter dry so as to refine it and transform into creative energy.
