PARADISE LOST

With multiple meanings and multiple colours, the universe of Aurélie Menaldo draws us into childhood, into holiness and also into surreal absurdity. Her artistic work begins with the collection of all sorts of objects that she chooses because of their appearance, their basic material and their colours. From this basic vocabulary, she composes and assembles sculptures and installations that she designs mostly in relation to where they will be exhibited. At the same time she intersperses her creations with extracts of texts which inspire their titles. Her work evokes feelings of both familiarity and unusualness, brought about by the improbable combination of known elements.

Aurélie Menaldo favours fundamental gestures to create simple sculptures, immediately perceptible, driven by a logic resembling that of a child capable of creating a magical world from daily objects. She changes the basic destination of things, giving them a fragility and precarious balance, while at the same them giving them a beauty which dialogues with the ornamental aspect, which she is not afraid of facing, like something that cannot be omitted in a work of art.

Since 2007 when she began her artwork, Aurélie Menaldo has been creating works of art which juggle with ambiguity – between seriousness and carelessness, danger and harmlessness, functionality and uselessness. By blending objects and their striking colours incongruously, she slightly shifts the perspective, making way for 

virtual narratives. So the playground at the Villa du Park, with its slide balancing on one pedestal and its turned-around swing become worrying objects; the walkway the colour of the Playmobile circuits which invades the Metz Octave Cowbell gallery requires us to follow a  constrained and elevated path from window to window; likewise these supermarket turnstiles painted red can make a wasteland bloom, or also this miniature futuristic town made of plastic habitats for rodents take us back to our own aberrations.

Either inside or outside in public areas, the procedure remains identical and takes us fully into a dystopian world where balloon-birds blow up a cage, where giant spinning tops fill the space, and where footballs made of cement invite us to a new type of game.

At the Ferme de la Chapelle, Aurelie Menaldo is inspired by the complexity of the space and architectural elements there, which remind her of the structure of a cathedral, and from which she adopts some of the typologies, such as the columns, flowers, the special lighting, the treasures from the crypt, themes which she reinterprets in the installations specially designed for this art centre. Through the title, Paradise Lost, the artist also refers to medieval gardens, childhood nostalgia, and to the poem by Milton and the French popular song.

The exhibition begins in the first room with its velvet columns of glowing colours, which duplicate the existing central pillar. This monumental colonnade seems to pierce through the ceiling and spread over the first floor as supports for different sculptures of all types of shapes: a fountain, a Statue of Liberty covered with seeds, a New York tower, a tentacular structure and a floral composition. The colour of the wall, reflecting the blue of the sky and the direct colours of different sculptures on this floor, create an ethereal, paradisiac and floral atmosphere.

The platform installed in the second room holds large-size cut outs made from survival blankets. The light fragility of this material and the precious aspect of its gold colour transform this space into a sort of treasure crypt. We can find Aurélie Menaldo’s recurring patterns: the toboggan, tripods for blocking roads, bricks and poetic quotations. A flag made from the same golden material could refer to those found in churches and used for processions.

The journey ends in the basement which here becomes a hybrid place, between magic and death. With is floor covered in salt and star-shaped flowers, this space could be a cave with 

curative qualities, an image which contradicts the lit-up sign on the floor, showing the nuclear symbol and reminding us of parterres of fallen tombstones. With this last room, Aurélie Menaldo provides another key to understanding and visiting the exhibition with a different view, like a labyrinth with multiple entries.