MYTHES

20 October - 24 October

Collège des Bernardins
20 Rue de Poissy 75005 Paris
France

Simon Porte Jacquemus’ first major curatorial undertaking, in collaboration with Galerie Chenel and Galerie Dina Vierny, orchestrates a dialogue between the antique, the sculpted, and the everyday. This undertaking reveals a shared mythic resonance of line, volume, and human presence. It is a conversation across time: from the terracotta and marble of Olympia that inspired Maillol, to his small-scale bronzes, to the geometric folds of Jacquemus’ garments. In each is both allegory and monument. The continuity is palpable: the antique informs Maillol, and Maillol, in turn, informs Simon Porte Jacquemus’ work.

At the heart of it all lies antique sculpture, the inexhaustible point of origin. These marbles have given to generations a language of measure. They are the discipline through which nature could be distilled into myth and for Simon Porte Jacquemus, they are the geometry that underpins the poise of a silhouette.

Aristide Maillol devoted his life to the pursuit of harmony, transforming nature into myth to reaffirm the poetry and vitality of earthly existence. A fervent admirer of the ancients, he drew on Egyptian art, archaic and classical Greek sculpture, yet always sought to create ex nihilo. His nudes are pared to essentials, stocky Mediterranean figures, short-waisted, upstanding breasts, powerful hips, smoothed with a keen sense of measure and stasis. A serene classicism touched with rustic vitality. Like Maillol, Simon Porte Jacquemus unites to the virtue of a classic the innocence of a primitive.

Both find in the antique not nostalgia but a structure for invention, a base upon which to build their own new mythologies. The antique gave Maillol a discipline, a way of returning the human figure to its most enduring proportions. In Jacquemus, the echo is subtler but no less insistent: his garments draw on the same economy of line, showing that simplicity, when rightly measured, can embody the whole of elegance just as Polykleitos’ canon once inscribed it in stone.

This attention to geometry, to the harmony of human presence and elemental form, finds a renewed expression in Simon Porte Jacquemus. His garments too are sculptural, architectural even, folded and draped with the same careful eye the masters of antiquity and Maillol trained on the human body. « Le paysan », the model of the countryside, recurs in both: in Porte Jacquemus’ fashion, with his deceptively simple clothing; in Maillol’s studio in the physical type he sought to eternalize. It is within the exhibition’s scenography, staged as a sequence of evocative and poetic daily-life scenes, that these affinities unfold, lending the continuity of figures and gesture a living, almost cinematic intimacy.


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