At nouveaux deuxdeux in Munich, Paola Siri Renard stages Double Star, seven cast-aluminum horse legs severed from their riders and a twelve-part body suspended in orbital formation.
Public equestrian monuments were built to settle an argument. The general rides; the horse carries; military authority, colonial conquest and heroic masculinity get cast in bronze and planted in the square as though the verdict were permanent. Paola Siri Renard begins by removing the rider. What is left, in sculpture drawn from preparatory maquettes, is the animal that did the work, dismantled from below and reduced to its legs.
Seven cast-aluminum legs hang at nouveaux deuxdeux, each one split down its length into two faces. One side is muscled and anatomical, hooves and tendons exposed; the other dissolves into the whiplash scrolls of Art Nouveau, the vegetal ornament that once trimmed colonial wealth into something decorative. The cut runs between them like a seam, and from that mirrored gap a second identity surfaces. Renard treats the decoration not as surface but as evidence.
The smaller works cantilever straight out of the white wall on rust-flecked mounts, some in matte sandblasted grey, others polished to a hard mirror. A hoof reads as bone; a haunch swells into raw mass; a coil of acanthus turns back on itself. Her engagement with Art Nouveau follows the art historian Debora Silverman, who traced how the period's tendrils and blossoms travelled with empire. The ornamented monument, in this reading, is a living political body that absorbs domination into its decorative skin.
The central installation gathers all of it into one recomposed figure, fragmented into twelve elements and racked on slotted stainless-steel armatures that recall the rails of a slaughterhouse. Suspended in a ring across a marble herringbone floor, the parts can be read as a single rearing animal or scattered into abstraction. A hammered jingle bell lies on the tiles, wired to the structure, the show's only note of sound and an old emblem of livestock and control.
The title borrows from astronomy, where two stars orbit a center too faint to see. Renard makes the figure literal across the gallery, presence circling an absent core, and turns it on history itself. What looks stable from one position falls apart from another. The invisible center is the thing monuments need but can never show, the shared belief that binds scattered fragments into a story a city agrees to tell.
What survives here is neither the hero nor the whole beast, but a partial, post-identitarian figure, suspended between organism and machine, monument and collapse. Renard keeps it provisional on purpose, the zipper motif of her mounts insisting that every configuration is a state it could be unzipped from. The monument is not finished and not fallen. It is still mutating, with the violence of its making left visibly inside.
