Opening reception Saturday 15 Feb, from 5pm, in the presence of the artist

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Myrtille Tibayrenc is a well-known French director and curator working on the contemporary art scene of Thailand where she established over a decade ago.

In 2017, she debuted her artistic career, presenting her own paintings at the Serindia Gallery in Bangkok. She then held several striking Pop-Up exhibitions in unconventional venues; At the Barbar Fetish Club in Bangkok’s red-light district Patpong, or even in a public toilet during the Bangkok Biennial 2018. In 2019 she launched a complete catalog of her works.

For the first time presenting a selection of old and new works in her own walls, “Cadavres Exquis” will mark the 10-year anniversary of the Toot Yung art center.

Mainly inspired by the Renaissance and classic painting, Tibayrenc tries to reconnect with the notions of sacred in art and how people nowadays answer to religious archetypes. By revisiting religious and erotic themes, she questions the shifts of idealized beauty and moral values. The choice of small canvasses is a deliberate and meaningful choice. “I like the contrast of powerful images in very small formats. They somehow carry the intensity of icons. A small piece is something intimate, a secret, that you can carry with you like your own personal altar, a memento mori or ex-voto”. Tibayrenc works mainly in series. The confrontation of two or more visions of her theatre of pain creates an emotional gap, a vortex where our own feelings, crave, fears mix with the artist’s own universe, literally in a kind of “cadavre exquis”. (Exquisite Corpse)

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“ Myrtille Tibayrenc realizes the paradox of sharing her deepest feelings rarely showing anything personal in her subjects: a collection of works inspired by anonymous images she collected mainly around the Web. During her slow painting process, she reunites the common and the extraordinary, the sacred and the profane, the personal and the collective. In her erotic works, Tibayrenc draws on both the historical gravity surrounding the female nude and the ubiquity of pornographic images in the Internet era. She meditates upon the emotional violence of the original data, and infusing it with her own mood and style, soothes the blank and often aggressive documents. But rather than mere violence, she is concerned by strong emotional states.

Her world has a mystic coloration that reminds us that love and pain will always tear us apart.”

Claude Estèbe