Marie Jacotey

Be true, be wild, be mad.

Don’t You Worry Honey is a window into the recurring themes that provoke and inform Marie Jacotey’s practice. Demonstrating her emblematic storytelling of love, lust and landscape, this selection of works shows the mediums and techniques the artist has used to capture her subjects over the years, presenting coloured pencil drawings on plaster from the series Getting over you (2014), works in dry pastel on Japanese paper from the series Nights of Poor Sleep (2016) and recent works on paper and canvas made on the Mahler and LeWitt Residency in Spoleto and in her new studio in Marseille.

Without a structured narrative, the tale of these works becomes one of intense feelings, memories and mistakes made. We have been caught flicking through the muddled pages of a diary — a poetic ellipsis in visual terms, private and confessional. Common to each is a preoccupation with how relationships — those most intimate and cherished — shape the perception of our interior and physical landscapes. It is a world of humble ferocity, filled as much with violence, desperation and romance, as it is with tenderness, melancholy and solitude. Together these drawings provide a glimpse into the vicissitudes of falling in love, its ecstasy and absence.

Nowhere is Jacotey’s diaristic style clearer than in her works on plaster. Coloured pencil on postcard-sized tablets, they depict empty landscapes or an isolated woman, sometimes accompanied by corpses or ghosts. The rawness of their materiality, evocative of touch and texture, is set against the spectral works of dry pastel specially mounted and framed by Soft Baroque. Where plaster calls forth the presence of the body, the works on Japanese paper are tenebrous and cerebral, captured between panes of glass and silicone. Less figurative, more concentrated on mood and landscape, Nights of Poor Sleep turned inward — an ineluctable and devouring mist that obscured bodily tension for a deeper sense of introspection and melancholy.

In a continuation of her works on fabric — typically large double-sided textiles evocative of the Palazzo style — Jacotey has begun a parallel series of works on quilted canvas. They present sombre memento mori — tulips, sword and helmet. As with the recent felt-tip pen drawings they are untethered from a clear protagonist, the fragmented thoughts of an unknown narrator, for whom the subjects of intimacy, love and rejection are never far away.

Don’t You Worry Honey is presented with the inaugural UK screening of Filles Bleues, Peur Blanche, an animated short-film co-directed by Marie Jacotey and Lola Halifa-Legrand and nominated for the 2020 Festival de Cannes Short Film Official Selection. Flora, the film’s heroine, is accompanied by her partner Nils on the way to meet his parents. They drive through lysergic landscapes illuminated by the sun as billboards advertise À la mort mon amour — until death my love. They are ambushed. Flora is held captive, hostage to a choral of enamoured and mystical women, and in the abyss of night she must face her newfound doubts.

Filles Bleues, Peur Blanche. Directed by Lola Halifa-Legrand and Marie Jacotey. Written by Lola Halifa-Legrand and illustrated by Marie Jacotey. Produced by Miyu Productions.

Marie Jacotey and Lola Halifa-Legrand have made two limited edition Blue Fear posters. They are available to order on our website.

Marie Jacotey (b. 1988, Paris) lives and works in Marseille, France. Jacotey studied at the Royal College of Art, London and École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include: Blue Fear, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2020); You Pinned Me Down Like a Butterfly on the Wall, Ballon Rouge Collective, New York US (2020); It Was a Night, The Naughton Gallery, Belfast UK (2018); Wild Love Me, NADA 2018 with Ballon Rouge Collective and Hannah Barry Gallery, Miami US (2018); Goodbye Darkness, Ballon Rouge Collective, Paris FR (2018); Sometimes It Happens, Humberto Poblete-Bustamante studio, London UK (2017); Morning Defeats, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2017); Everything I Used to Love About Us Is Dead, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2015); and Dolly, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2014).

Recent selected group exhibitions include: Home Stories, Vitra Design Museum, Germany DE (2020); Super Zoom, Paris FR (2019); Absinthe §3, Spit & Sawdust, London UK (2019); Generation Y, Platform Foundation, London UK (2019); Speak Love, fAN, Vienna AU (2019); DéjàVu, Chez Kit, Double Séjour, Paris FR (2019); The Inside Out, Drawing Room, London UK (2018); Architectural Ethnography, Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice IT (2018); XOXO, Soy Capitán, Berlin DE (2017); Assemble: How We Build, Architekturzentrum Wien, Austria AU (2017); Loveless, McQueen project space, London UK (2016); What’s the meaning of a goldfish, Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Belgium BE (2016); 60eme Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge, France FR (2016); and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Liverpool Biennial UK (2015-2016).