Chloé Quenum handles graphic, linguistic, eclectic, ambiguous, and mobile elements drawn from different cultures, extracting them from their context to give them new consistency through different processes of transmutation. The elements take on a new form of life, breathing into material signs, decorative assemblages of indeterminate origin. The artist invites us to examine the effect of contextual displacement and transfiguration on these objects, while questioning their power of evocation or engendering their ability to generate new narratives through capillarity.
Here, visible and invisible traces, rebuses engraved on calabashes from the Kingdom of Dahomey become organic, living, autonomous, and animated forms; there, the Hebrew alphabet is redistributed in a serial sequence of ideograms; patterns printed on wax fabric are transformed into abstract symbols that look indescribable at first glance; here again, tattoos move from skin to paper; contours take shape and relief, frames become anthropomorphic, provoking unexpected encounters while blurring our usual temporal, spatial, artistic, or disciplinary reference points.
Nothing could be further from the essential grasp of all these elements—and yet they are certainly carriers of a history, one yet questioned and distanced from its original meaning—which can only be understood by those who wield the codes. By performing one final act of transfiguration, Chloé Quenum manages to compose new narratives, often, if not always, using a coded and cryptic language of her own.
Her work has recently been featured in solo and group exhibitions, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau (2023), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2021, 2014), the Fondation Pernod Ricard (2021, 2014, 2013), the Centre Pompidou (2019), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2015), among other venues. Her works are visible in several public and private collections, including the Musée national d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris), the FRAC Alsace, Île-de-France, Grand Large, and Nouvelle-Aquitaine, as well as the Crédit municipal de Paris, the Kadist Foundation, and the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation. Chloé Quenum represented Benin at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. ...
Since the gallery was established in 2018, Martina Simeti has cultivated an interdisciplinary program. Martina Simeti is deeply involved in the production process together with the represented artists, working actively to generate new opportunities for exhibition beyond its own walls.
