黑料不打烊

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Des signes, des sc猫nes, Victoria Palacios's first solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels. Born in 1992 in Rennes, the French artist has lived and worked in Brussels for several years. She graduated in performance and painting from the 脡cole de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in 2019. Through a multidisciplinary practice combining painting, music, and performance, Victoria Palacios immerses visitors in a theatrical world of layered narratives, blending the sublime with the unsettling. The exhibition unveils new paintings, objects, and other recent works, in which captivating figures come to life. Each piece seems suspended between the ecstasy of a celebration at its height and the melancholy of a spectacle drawing to a close.

Clowns, swans, veiled widows, and ghostly figures greet visitors in procession as they enter the exhibition. The objects depicted come to life as well: they dance - like the bagpipe (biniou) - or sway in sinuous curves, like a lamp post beckoning spectators to follow. An animistic dimension infuses every medium, transforming each into a living presence under the force of the artist's gesture. Within these immaculate white walls, every element joins in a grand celebration-one that intoxicates with its forms, its images, and its colours, as garish as they are profound. Each work on view seems to have already lived, bearing traces of wear - like the paint-splattered shoes in the exhibition, left ready to slip onto the feet of protagonists poised to step onto the stage at any moment. Here, the spectacle-and its inherent comedy-seems poised to begin.

The visitor's perceptive sensibility is called into play, disoriented simultaneously by space, time, and the rush of emotions that course through them. It is precisely this delicate tension-emotional and temporal-that Victoria Palacios seeks to capture: what thrill takes hold of us in the moments before the show begins? And what, then, is the meaning of the vertigo that grips us once the stage is empty? What becomes of the objects, the lines, the fleeting laughter, the clowning, and the shared intoxication when the party is over?1 Between curtains, chequered floors, and theatrical stagings, the moment of grace is brief, and melancholy soon takes its place.

The works embody a subtle ambivalence, in which the sublime and the unsettling intertwine in a disquieting feast. The swan is emblematic of this tension-its majestic beauty masking an underlying aggression beneath its graceful appearance. The artist deepens this duality through the figure of the clown, who can provoke both bursts of laughter and shivers of fear. As for the widow, draped in sumptuous, silky fabrics, she conjures a sense of inner struggle, tinged with the melancholy of a bygone era. This emotional tension permeates all of Victoria Palacios's work, where humour, joy, and vertigo intertwine in a single breath.