Camille Henrot: Milk Moon

The moon has always affected our planet, our moods, our imagination and our history. Ever since ancient times the moon has been a symbol of fertility and favorable auspices, but also of mystery and melancholy. Camille Henrot‘s (Paris, 1978) exhibition “Luna di latte” at the Madre museum, curated by Cloé Perrone, explores the cultural and symbolic significance attached to Monday, or “moon day.” The exhibited works—100 drawings and collages, seven sculptural sketches in various media and mural paintings—are a selection of preparatory material for Monday, Henrot’s exhibition at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome, a project that will develop to comprise all the days of the week at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in autumn 2017. In deciding to present the preliminary stages of other exhibitions and to make her ongoing projects visible, Henrot transforms three galleries of the museum in a space-time of continuous creation, a threshold that introduces us to her creative process. Fluctuating between the figurative and the abstract, the emergence of an idea and its execution, these works represent provisional allegories of the emotional and intellectual states related to Monday: an anthropomorphic figure unable to leave its bed, a character who fixes a screen hoping for a miraculous message, a podium hosting a creature who does not know if it has been victorious… The notion itself of time, and the meanings historically attributed to the days of the week, are reinterpreted by Henrot as human fictions, pointing out that our impulses and systems to impose order are mere conventions and fables. A need perhaps analogous to what we might experience by entering the studio of an artist at work, just as Henrot permits us to do, on the occasion of this exhibition.