Salomé Chatriot: La Victoire d’Arlequin

13 Mar-26 Apr 2025

Overview

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present ‘La Victoire d’Arlequin’, a new body of work by Paris-based Salomé Chatriot (b. 1995). The exhibition in London from March 14 – April 26 marks the artist’s debut with Carl Kostyál following her participation in the gallery’s Invitational Draw Jam in 2022 and 2024.

“La Victoire d’Arlequin presents Salomé Chatriot’s continued exploration of the vesicular and sinuous conduits between organic and synthetic materials. Through her acute technological and tactile process, she captures her own respiratory rhythm to breathe life into the forms. The humidity of her exhalation is palpable, glistening on their surfaces.

Since her initial performances, in which her breath was calibrated to inform the structure of her work—be it painting, sculpture, video, or installation—her practice has continued to evolve. These works embody her dialogue between organisms and apparatus: from the gears of a turbo generator to the CGI shapes that pulsate in her rhythm and, finally, the oil and enamel that spread across aluminium. These pieces form a symbiosis of both bodies. Neither is master over the other; rather, in a delicate pas de deux, it breathes in, she breathes out, borders collapse, and new bodies take form.

Chatriot’s typically abstract shapes—undulating tentacles, serpentine coils, and lustrous orbs—sprout human silhouettes. In her Idols series, the artist presents bodies ensconced in their protective chrysalis as they emerge in metamorphosis. For the first time, these figures have fully formed faces. Yet, frozen in archetypal perfection, their mouths are hollow, and in place of the density of vital matter, they glow from within—void. As the diptych presents, these idols are figures to be observed in 360 degrees, totems of past and future adoration. On the wall, a Galalith relic extends this exploration, its milky orb—an early plastic derived from casein—paradoxically bridging the inert and the animate, the primordial and the alchemical.

Through a meticulous and fastidious process, each parceled enamel layer must be painted at a precise interval so as not to drip or bleed into another. Only after everything has dried are the blazing oil backgrounds completed. The result is a glistening stratum, carefully sutured into a voluminous whole—yet still a mosaic of disparate parts, like the tapestry of the Harlequin’s garment or the shifting topography of a map, her own body likewise assembled in artifice and illusion. “Elsewhere, then, is never the same as here; no piece resembles another” – Michael Serre’s Le Tiers Instruit. 

And so, as the light catches the uneven geography of the hanging painted sculpture Combustible Tubes, Tender Flesh, we catch glimpses of ourselves as well as refracted parts of the Fetish Goddesses (Combustion Flow) on the walls around us. Our presence and perception suddenly entangle with theirs, and we find ourselves gazing through a trick mirror or into an alternate dimension.

Where the Harlequin reigns, reality escapes us—forms imbricate into the petals and folds of her figures, and representations splinter across the glossy planes of her surfaces. No longer a mere trickster, she is logic itself, a traveler between worlds who returns bearing the iridescent traces of every crossing. Through Chatriot’s prism, we step forward, not seeking mastery but transformation—like the Harlequin’s patchwork, which, in its thousand colours, does not resolve into white but into a spectrum so complete that it shimmers beyond the visible.”

– Anitra Lourie, 2025

Since 2019, Salomé Chatriot (b. 1995) deploys her breath through ‘Fragile Ecosystem’, a series of performances hosted in different contexts with which she interacts through a machine capturing her breath in real time. The artist’s breath generates biodata that inform the matrix of the other media she uses: painting, sculpture, installations and videos.

In 2021, Salomé Chatriot was selected by Cécilia Alemani for the Biennale College Arte workshop at the 59th Venice Biennale. She directed her first film, ‘Our Symbiosis Infected her Fertile Systems’, commissioned by Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magnini, produced by Unfinished Camp based on a proposal by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and András Szantó. The film has been shown at the Shed Museum in New York and at the HEK in Basel. Salomé Chatriot has performed at Lafayette Anticipations and the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, in Gstaad with the Luma Foundation and at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid. In 2024 a selection of her films, videos, paintings and sculptures were show at Germany’s Marta Herford Museum as part of an exhibition exploring the intersecting relationships between art and technology: ‘Between Pixel and Pigment. Hybrid Painting in Postdigital Times’.