A haunting exploration of surfaces and material decay, Mimosa Echard’s Lies at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, interrogates the blurred boundary between protection and vulnerability in consumer spaces.
This second exhibition at the gallery expands Echard’s fascination with decay and metamorphosis, presenting oxidized metallic tableaux and photographs that excavate the architectural and symbolic history of Paris’ 1920s shopping arcades. Inspired by the notion of these commercial “passages” as psychic spaces of both desire and dissolution, Lies explores our compulsive relationship with consumption, both as an embodied experience and as a social mirage.
Echard’s tableaux, constructed from electromagnetic shielding fabric and aluminum foil, operate as material metaphors for spaces that simultaneously attract and repel. The tableaux undergo corrosive treatments, resulting in surfaces that bleed and fragment, colored in metallic greens and silvers. This intentional degradation summons the unsettling duality of protection and exposure, transforming the gallery’s Haussmannian grandeur into a laboratory of disturbed surfaces. Through these exaggeratedly scaled works, Echard suggests liminal points between architecture and organism, recalling not only windows and motherboards but also the connective tissues of an increasingly networked, digitized world.
These corroding tableaux are set against a series of photographs taken in Les Arcades des Champs Élysées, where abandoned mannequins, dusty trinkets, and other static remnants of the past confront their own obsolescence. Here, Echard captures the arcade as a haunted ‘non-place,’ an anachronistic theater of souvenirs now reduced to props in a drama of human absence. Her work juxtaposes the “pleasure architecture” of bygone urbanism with the insulated ideal of a radiation-free sanctuary. The resulting meditation is a compelling vision of contemporary desire—a space where the boundaries between human and object blur, pointing to a world where both are endlessly consumable.
Echard’s Lies is a sensuous, unsettling exploration of decay and nostalgia in the urban body. In these tableaux and photographs, she probes the erotic appeal of surfaces and the paradox of safety in exposure, reanimating the seemingly inert objects around us into a dialogue with the viewer's own consumerist anxieties.
