Peeping through the looking glass

Peeping through the looking glass “Still she haunts me, phantomwise,” Peep all you want; the blurring paint’s left its stain. Sight obstructed, yet you trespass. Beyond the whitened glass. “Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—’ She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.” –Lewis Carroll, 1872 The illusioned warm breath of a digitally burning fireplace whiffs through the space. Cushiony flowers in bloom whisper a daunting soundscape from the height of their metallic stems. Dark melodies from a mother to a child reach the passer-by. Further, the trapped shadows of leaves discreetly detach themselves from the foggy window; they echo with the captured threads outlining wild blossoms stuck under the glassed-plexi. While parchments lying on the ground seem to embrace an eternal dormant state, a golden key has been made a prisoner of canvas – the glaze barring all possibility to escape the anguishing atmosphere. The homeliness of the exhibition is tainted. Somehow turned spooky, Peeping through the looking glass is almost evoking the twisted aspect of domesticity. Most of the works having surfaced during multiple periods of lockdowns remind us of times of outdoors invisibility. As streets and front-windows were left lulled and empty, homes became sharing havens as much as maddening cells. Peeping never appeared as tempting hardly refraining our voyeuristic curiosity. This group exhibition is built on friendships and the hazard of affinities. The show brings together the radically different practices of Caroline Schattling Villeval, Félise De Conflans, Stefania Carlotti, Fanny Devaux, Margaux Dewarrat and Hanna Rochereau, artists whose paths are nonetheless connected. As the first cross-Channel coordination tandem between Hanna Rochereau and Héloïse Chassepot, Peeping through the looking glass experiments with a more organic form of exhibition, where spontaneous correspondences as much as contradictions freely weave into a fluid conversation. –Text by Alexia Pierre