Inspiration through material
At 22,48 m², The Steidz presents SWEAT DREAMS, an exhibition gathering seven artists born between the late 80’s and the early 2000’s. It is based on the emergence of dreamlike imagery within the domestic space, which is both an intimate safe space and an enclosed one, opening up to multiple natures of dreams — surrealist, erotic, abstract — to the point of revealing possible lurking threats.
Some say they never have any, for others it’s a regular nightly occurrence. Herein lies a versatility: universal acts, objects of fascination since the most ancient civilizations tried deciphering them. They defy command, all control, all reason. The only certainty lies in the fact that it appears at night, space-time during which sleep takes over and the body surrenders its upright stanc in favor of laying down. Élise Weber (born 2000) translates this in a painting distancing itself from reality. While the predominant portrayal evokes an assured familiarity, its nocturnal scenes take shape of a theatre of the everyday life, where the sets and subjects, frozen in time, allow us to approach our collective solitudes, and the mystery surrounding our intimate spaces.
Sleep can be seen as a passage, a doorway, or even a window opened to both fantasies and nightmares. This allusion resonates in the work of Lisa Bravi (born in 1995), who, through the use of textiles, explores the indicators of domestic space and the patterns defining it. Curtains, small windows, baskets, spider-like stools—her sewn sculptures, with their soft padding of wadding, satin, or cotton, create a furniture-like environment that invites touch and carries a surrealist undertone. Pierre Dumaire’s (born in 1993) portraits further this idea. By painting on silk or on gently crumpled Thai paper, his images curl up in these surfaces like bodies sinking into the folds of bedsheets. The erotic-queer essence of his subjects, drawn from underground homosexual magazines, archive pornographic films, and personal photographs, contributes to this dreamlike embodiment, sometimes flirting with danger and threat, as seen in Drive (2024) illustrates. Then comes the nightmare.
This disturbing sensuality, evoked as much by the imagery than by the choice of material, is also significant in the sculptures of Loup Sarion (born in New York, 1987). He produced a series of noses devoid of faces, his way of drawing portraits of friends, lovers, or strangers he has met. Neither masculine nor feminine, this vital bodily fragment charged with eroticism, according to the artist, reveals a person’s history and identity through each asperity, pore and curve. The choice of wax as the main medium reinforces this analogy with the skin, which, stripped from its owner’s entire body, takes on a heavy, almost mortuary aspect, with its subtle ashen complexion. Mélodie Charrier (born in 1995), focuses on creating greasy, almost oozing figures, using resin in particular. Its volumes, paired with the colors unfolding, evoke a nature that has become hybrid, transformed by mankind. The abstraction coming from her sculptures outlines artificial reliefs, a kind of plot drawing on an imaginative landscape vocabulary, going against over-concreted and saturated environments.
This visual glossary resonates with the ashtrays flourishing on the gallery’s floor made by Cédric Esturillo (born in 1988): his Ashtray series reinterprets the symbolism of this domestic object across the centuries, through the prism of an organic, vaporous sculpturality, while bestowing on the vessel a dreamlike, almost romantic quality. In contrast to this palpable and functional materiality, the paintings of Aranthell (born in 1987), also organized in series, focus on framing: each oil on canvas determines, by its format, a sample of our society, our intimacies, needs and distractions. These samples, both loving and insulting, tell our story through contradiction and duality. It is our thoughts, nightmarish and fantasized, made visible by a finger’s imprint on the surface of a misty, dripping window.
