“On the threshold of this exhibition, we could indulge in a Prévert-style inventory. But here, we must be wary of appearances: ordinary things have a life, and not just any life. The life that Magali Lambert breathes into them.
Let’s start by saying that the artist is a gleaner. She collects, preserves and safeguards what we no longer want, objects that have been abandoned, discarded or forgotten. What we’d like to get rid of is the very material with which Magali Lambert makes her work. As guardian of these relics, after a mission that might be described as salvation from inevitable disappearance, she gives them a new existence, diverting them from their original use and identity. In short, she turns destinies upside down and opens up vertiginous fields of possibility. With them, she conspires improbable machinations, buffoonish, beautiful or nightmarish. A demiurge of strange resurrections, she brings the lost back to life and makes passages from death to life.
Whether in her cabinets of curiosities, her stagings of everyday objects or faded taxidermy, she composes visual cadavres exquis, incongruous objets-valises, subversions and games of coincidence. Magali Lambert also mixes media – photography, drawing, engraving, installation and sculpture – to create works where time, space, the real and the fake, the dead and the living collide. Her hybridizations, curious chimeras and encounters with objects and animals give rise to a whimsical, poetic universe. In this way, she reveals unsuspected and disconcerting meanings, bringing out their symbolic dimension and creating a new visual vocabulary. Her works have a sedimentary dimension, offering many levels of interpretation: they are as playful and humorous as they are desperate and dismal.
Ordinary things have secret lives, unsuspected beauties beyond death and oblivion, and Magali Lambert takes us with her into worlds that can be constantly reinvented by the shift of our gaze.”
Caroline Bénichou