{ Galerie Papillon }

This sixth solo exhibition by Frédérique Loutz marks 20 years of collaboration: an opportunity to present a dialogue between older works (from 2004) and more recent ones (2025), showcasing two decades of work which include drawings as well as sculptures in glass, cardboard and fabric.

Frédérique Loutz says: laughter is not pure.

And also, the worst is never certain.

It's almost a Freudian slip, like a tongue twister: a simulated or provoked slip of the tongue, when words jostle each other and the tongue, stumbling, inadvertently gives it meaning. This type of approach towards expression, seemingly awkward but fundamentally free, is hardly surprising in an artist coming from Moselle, who grew up between languages and cultures, at their inevitably turbulent and even conflicting confluence. And we can assume the effects of this by the way she isolates and composes her forms: sometimes in clusters, sometimes in garlands, in collision as well as in succession or construction; on the border between drawing and sculpture, not only because of the way she oscillates between plan and volume, but also because of her work with pencil, the force she must apply to densify the color, the reliefs that emerge visually through hatching as well as materially through the deposit of pigments and the deformation of the paper (as with embossed metal). Brightly colored eyes, flowers, and mouths have become more frequent in her recent works. They have the obviousness and simplicity of schematic representations (illustrations, comics, signage), that seem reassuring like elements of a decor, harmless like what is known, familiar, cute, childish. But they are just as disturbing in their autonomy and proliferation, through effects of exaggeration, permutation, or interference: a sunflower for a nose in the middle of a face, a face completely consumed by a wide smile, the coin and its two sides, because here the images are far from innocent. They come to life, caught up in their own story and all the stories we would like them to tell, swirling and turning upside down, one word for another: like when a figurative expression is taken literally or a conventional saying is twisted into an unusual one.

Laughter is not pure, and a smile that is too wide (stretching from ear) or held too long (tense), clearly showing too many teeth that are too regular (hypnotic like spiraling eyes or a mesmerizing gaze), becomes a grimace, even a sneer: playful, certainly, but also forced, painful, deceitful, grim, defensive, even aggressive. And the meaning curls up, at the same time as the lips(1). Especially since, like Lewis Carroll's Alice facing the cat who smiles and disappears starting with the tail, we say that we have often seen a face without a smile, but more rarely a smile without a face... When the young girl first sees the cat, she asks the Duchess, the cat's owner, why it is smiling like that. "It's a Cheshire cat, that's why," she replies. It's a quick-witted response, because the expression "grin like a Cheshire cat" predates the character who brings this name to life in the novel. The explanation is irrefutable and yet absurd, since, as is often the case in such situations, we do not know for certain where it comes from: perhaps in this milk-producing county of England, a cheese was made in the shape of a cat, which was traditionally eaten starting with the tail. As for the mouths drawn by Frédérique Loutz, they resemble sausages or those sausage-shaped balloons often carried by clowns, with their exaggerated smiles and makeup that showcases their cathartic candor and clumsiness.

The worst is never certain, and it is certainly better to laugh about it(2): this is the meaning of masquerades, carnivals, merry-go-rounds, dances of death, and other farandoles, whose spirit the artist readily evokes. Balance is required to dance harmoniously, since every movement risks losing that balance at any moment; and however chaotic they may seem, the assemblies are designed to tip over and recover more effectively: smiles have this function (to shift), as well as forming festoons, those of sculpted decorations like embroidery or even celebrations. Frills and fanfare? More like a refrain, one that comes from childhood, fairy tales and lieders, and which is analyzed in Mille-plateaux along the lines of "sometimes, sometimes, sometimes": "Sometimes chaos is a huge black hole, and we strive to fix a fragile point as its center. Sometimes we organize a calm and stable 'pace' (rather than a form) around this point: the black hole has become a home. Sometimes onto this pace we implant an escape from the black hole(3). " To enter into Frédérique Loutz's dances is to cross all these paths, to revel in the seriousness, with enthusiasm but without naivety, with a smile on your lips and your eyes wide open.

Guitemie Maldonado (August 2025)

(5) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980, p. 383. 

NEWS

Saturday october 11 at 3pm

Talk between Frédérique Loutz and Amélie Adamo.

Part of S’émerveiller,a series of talks conceived by the art historian and exhibition curator in partnership with a selection of galleries in the Marais district.

BIOGRAPHY IN FEW DATES

Born in 1974, Sarreguemines, France. Lives and works in Paris.

1997 Graduated from Beaux-Arts Paris.

2005 1st solo exhibition at the Galerie Papillon.

2007 Villa Médicis, Rome; Il était une fois WALT DISNEY. Aux sources de l’art des studios Disney, National Galleries of the Grand Palais, Paris and the museum of Beaux-arts, Montreal.

2009 Nominated for the Contemporary Drawing Prize – Fondation Guerlain; La force de l’art 02, Triennal at the Grand Palais, Paris.

2010 elles@centrepompidou, Paris.

2011 Tous cannibales, la maison rouge, Paris and ME Collectors Room, Berlin.

2013 Coup(o)les, solo exhibition at the end of residency at the Château de Chambord.

2019 XXL, Estampes Monumentales Contemporaines, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen.

2021 Publication of her first monograph Girrrland with The Drawer publishers.

2023 Immortelle – Vitality of a young French figurative painting, MO.CO., Montpellier.

2024 Arles Drawing Festival.

2025 Claude, solo exhibition at the cultural center Logre, Caen.

AMONG THE COLLECTIONS

Cnap (Centre national des arts plastiques)

Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou

FRACs Sud, Picardie, Normandie

Florence and Daniel Guerlain Collection, Laurent Dumas Collection