Casting, amitiés côté jardin

From Toy Story to Night at the Museum, stories of personification are omnipresent. Telling them is a way of turning our projections into living creations. Much like pareidolia, our emotional connections to the figures represented in artworks we encounter reflect our own intimate experiences.

Casting, amitiés côté jardin [Casting, garden-side friendships] tells the story of a group of characters who come together in a circle, in the intimacy of a garden. This circle, inhabited by different yet interconnected figures, takes the shape of an exhibition. Imagining the emotional and intimate bonds that can exist between artworks, the exhibition focuses on the affective relationships artists may have with them. Within it coexist multiple beings who shift the question of representation toward that of embodiment, and figuration toward personification. Their shared presence, their gazes crossing, all come together and allow for a narrative to emerge—a fictional story between characters within the same scene.

A group exhibition is always an opportunity for multi-layered encounters. This one is the result of numerous collaborations. The first was made possible through the program Reality of an Exhibition, a partnership between the contemporary art space In extenso and the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole. This program brought together five students who, supported by the In extenso team, have been working together for half a year on the conception and curation of this exhibition. Together, they visited artists’ studios and contemporary art collections throughout the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Later, the artists themselves connected through a “circle of interviews” conducted via a digital platform—without ever meeting in person. By writing to one another, the artists exchanged thoughts on their practices, relationships to their works, and emotions.

Biographies of artists :

Adrien Brahimi lives and works in Lyon—though he would rather be elsewhere.In his practice, the canvas becomes a stage where elements of daily life, cinematic references and artistic devices meet. He incorporates real objects—clothing, accessories—to question the boundary between work and everyday life. His installations, often resembling film sets between takes, create transitional spaces where reality and fiction blur. The characters within, often inspired by cinema or the “infraordinary,” are disguised, made-up, exposed with their artifice and never quite in place. Painting, singing, and sculpture are some of the tools he uses to build these narrative-spaces. He conceives the artist’s role as that of a director, constructing scenes where every visible detail—including the edges of the frame and the off-camera space—contributes to the story.

Jimmy Beauquesne (1991, France) graduated from ENSAAMA in Paris and the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole (DNSEP, 2017). He lives and works in Paris, where his drawing and installation practice blends intimate spaces, mass culture, ornamentation and science fiction. His works have been shown in group exhibitions at : Magasins Généraux, Pantin (2019); MAMC, Saint-Étienne (2020); La Box, Bourges (2020); Ygrec – Ensapc, Aubervilliers (2020); Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2022); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023); Frac Île-de-France, Paris (2024). He was nominated for the Prix Dauphine (2019) and the Prix Sciences Po (2020).

Marie Ducaté (1954, Lille) lives and works in Marseille. Trained at the Beaux-Arts of Aix-en-Provence, she develops a cross-disciplinary practice that interweaves painting, ceramics, glass, textiles and furniture. Her work explores the relationships between color, material and ornament through a sensitive approach. She weaves together a body of work in which color becomes language, surface, and conceptual material. Her work has been shown extensively in France and Switzerland, including at the Musée Mandet (Riom), Pavillon de Vendôme (Aix-en-Provence), and Béa-Ba gallery (Marseille). Her pieces are held in public collections such as Frac Occitanie, the City of Marseille, and the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Lyon. She also creates commissions for Argentine chef Francis Mallmann. Her work has received broad coverage in both specialized and cultural media.

Ambre Kopac was born in 1998 in Utuna, in the Vent-Mort department of France. She lives and works in Paris. She inhabits cosmoses that bloom where the real merges with the imaginary, slipping into that frontier where everything and nothing seems to make sense. Partners drawn on canvas or sculpted in clay accompany her in the search for fictional narratives, continuously taking control of what is about to exist.

Marie L’Hours (1988, Brest) lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand. She graduated from EESAB Quimper in 2011. “Marie L’Hours tells stories. Without necessarily using words, she evokes spaces enveloping bodies, envelopes that become volumes, bodies fading into motifs within flat spaces. Combining performance, drawing, speech, and song, Marie L’Hours takes us into mysterious and sensitive worlds where we pass from color to scent, from the visible to the tangible, from point to line and from surface to substance.” — Isabelle Henrion, 2021 Marie’s artistic practice also extends into curating exhibitions, organizing events, and collaborating with artists around her. In 2016, she co-founded the performance festival Setu with her friend Morgane Besnard in Finistère. Since 2020, she has coordinated the municipal contemporary art space La Tôlerie in Clermont-Ferrand with Tom Castinel.

Elsa Muller, born in 1993 in Trier (Germany), lives and works between Lyon and Alsace. She first began in the sciences before switching to the arts, eventually graduating from the Beaux-Arts of Lyon in 2021. Her practice alternates primarily between painting and video—two mediums that, in her work, interact with each other through humor and irony. Her work has been shown at DOC (Paris), the 5th Triennale Jeune Création (Luxembourg), Fran Reus gallery (Majorca), the Les Instants Vidéos festival (Marseille), KOTE (Seoul), and the 4th and 6th editions of The Wrong Biennale (online). She recently participated in the “Création en cours” program run by Ateliers Médicis and was invited by L’envers des pentes for a week-long art residency in a mountain refuge, exploring trail running as a practice.From her studio in Lyon, she continues developing pictorial research that mixes preconceived imagery with artificial intelligence.

Lorette Pouillon graduated from ESAD Saint-Étienne in 2020. After her degree, she presented her first solo show TOUT DOÎT DISPA-RAITRE (“Everything Must Go”) in 2022 at La Galerie de l’Antenne in Saint-Étienne, followed by DU VENT SVP (“Some Wind, Please”)in 2023 at L’Attrape Couleurs in Lyon.She has participated in several residencies with institutions including Ateliers Médicis, Villa Glovettes, Le Creux de l’Enfer, and La NEF (a drama center dedicated to puppetry arts).Her work is greatly enriched by collaborations with performing artists, where she takes on roles as both scenographer and per-former. She currently lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand.

Biographies of curators :

Camille Cheyre, Charlotte Dartigues, Eva Salgueiro Gonçalves, Nina-Lou Siméon and Cameron White form the curatorial team behind Casting, amitiés côté jardin [Casting, garden-side friendships]. They are currently masters students at the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole, where they obtained their bachelor’s degree in June 2024. Although their practices and research are diverse, they each consider friendship as a necessary foundation, a daily support, and a gentle source of inspiration in their body of work.

Camille’s Cheyre work explores the notion of home, with a touch of fiction. Her papier-mâché sculptures—whimsical and offbeat—are often accompanied by acrylic paintings and soft sculptures. Her installations are often built as interactive spaces, filled with dark humour and oddities.

Charlotte Dartigues develops a practice she calls “colour material”. Experimenting with various mediums, she combines handmade pigments, protocol-based gestures and weaving, all in a study of how colour and material alter one another.

Nina-Lou Siméon addresses the topic of technology, without making digital art. She explores the blurring between the intimate and the virtual, questioning how internet culture, video games, and the overload of content influence identity construction. Her work primarily involves graphic and drawn expressions but also video, installation, publishing, writing and performance.

Eva Salgueiro Gonçalves examines sensitive and intimate relationships and exchanges through epistolary forms. Her work unfolds through the practice of publishing, blending writing, reading, engraving, photography and jewelry-making. Pop culture references, textual and visual research, a fondness for archives and nostalgia are all precious inputs to her approach.

In his work, Cameron White blends Greek myths and aesthetics of Christianity with the idea of situating himself and creating allegories of his transidentity and queerness throughout history. Metamorphosis appears as a natural theme, while the objects and the colours in his paintings, but also his texts become a place of comfort and poetic fullness within a post-apocalyptic reflection.