Hot Flowers, Warm Fingers

Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL, September 2023 – April 2024

The exhibition features five large installations that each take over an entire room. Each room examines a different aspect of the complexity of stereotypical representations and of performances and rituals in our society. The artist offers no solutions, no catharsis, but muddies, disrupts, and causes you to experience power structures in a different way. She holds up a mirror to the recent past as well as the events of today.

In the first room we find Hot Flashes Flowers (2023), a theatre set that combines the aesthetics of Valentine’s Day with a neat front yard. The decor was made specifically for Qu’un Sang Impur. Now the women in that film have reached their menopause, they are, as writer Virginie Despentes puts is, ‘off the market’. Instead of wilted flowers, as the cliched image of older women goes, Curnier Jardin celebrates their blooming powers with seductive underwear and red roses.

The corridor leading to the next room has been covered with the work Blond Corridor (2022) as if it has been given a new skin. Blond Corridor is based on an image of actress Marilyn Monroe, enlarged to such enormous proportions that it becomes an unrecognisable, abstract pattern. The actress appears trapped – or lost – in her own representation as a film icon. Curnier Jardin, in turn, envelops us in this abstract image.

Blond Corridor leads to Le Tombeau (2022). With this work, Curnier Jardin refers to contemporary peep shows but also to those of the seventeenth century when not only erotic scenes but also landscapes and theatrical tableaus were revealed. Once the light goes on, a diorama-like room becomes visible, reminiscent of the chapel of a Christian church, an archaeological dig tent or one of the Lascaux caves. On the walls are drawings created by the Feel Good Cooperative.

The other side of Blond Corridor brings the visitor into a reproduction of Adoration (2022), a permanent work Curnier Jardin created for the Casa di reclusione femminile della Giudecca, a women’s prison in Venice. The walls of the parlour of the prison are reproduced here on wallpaper.

In the next room Curnier Jardin plays with furniture and paintings from Central Museum’s collection.  Rather than historicizing or glorifying the past, Curnier Jardin brings together an eclectic mix of chairs, sofas and paintings that are surrounded – and watched – by Peaux de dame: soft, flat women made of imitation leather.

Peaux de Dame (series, 2018-ongoing) are soft, flat women made of imitation leather in flesh-coloured tones. They may be rolled up and put away, worn like a suit or hung on the wall like a pin-up. They are limp and slack, the way a woman’s skin loosens with age. These ladies are amorphous, but not necessarily objectified. They lounge on the museum’s furniture, marvel at St. Sebastian, watch TV and take in the scene from their position on the wall.

In the last room we enter in a chapel-like space, covered with an intense, mystical blue. In this spiritual atmosphere we found ourselves in a dialogue between different ritual objects and practices.
The altar Baubo fait la morte faces three bas-reliefs inspired by Pauline Curnier Jardin’s film on Catholic processions and collective rituals in Europe.

View of the exhibiton Hot Flowers, Warm Fingers, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL
Curated by Laurie Cluitmans
Photos: Gert Jan van Rooij, 2023