NEVER DREAM OF DYING
LE PORTIQUE, LE HAVRE, FRANCE
JULY 11 — SEPTEMBER 27, 2020

As part of the 2020 edition of Un Été au Havre, Le Portique welcomes Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau, a duo who work in a wide range of artistic fields, promoting interdisciplinarity and connections between different spheres and universes. In 2001, the group showTraversées, held at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, brought them to the attention of the general public: invited by curator Alexis Vaillant, the artists took over the walls of the institution, filling them with their drawings. One project followed another: a video clip for Air, a sleeve for Katerine, a character design for Kinder Surprise ® (not selected), T-shirts... Their work is nourished by these multiple collaborations, which encourage the circulation of ideas and constantly enrich their aesthetic and their practice. Abolishing all hierarchies between artistic languages, the duo refuse to allow themselves to be confined to one field, exploring all areas as creative avenues. «We like the idea of being open to everything, without hierarchy or complexes.

The Le Havre exhibition opens a door onto this creative space, offering an immersion into a world of drawings where soft shapes, brains, sexualized fruits and vegetables intersect. In the Portique space, the duo’s universe unfolds, and since graduating from the Beaux-Arts in Quimper in 1999, they’ve never stopped working with line, form and color to imagine figures, invent stories and create worlds in which young and old can immerse themselves:»We like to think of children in our exhibitions, and hang drawings at their height. Over 200 large-format (A3) drawings tell this artistic story. Far from being static, the line comes alive in the work of Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau, as evidenced by the gifs displayed on small screens, which punctuate the display, materializing and acting out the shift from one medium to another. Paper, digital... drawing plays with all languages and all techniques, allowing us to explore different facets of creation and explode boundaries in favor of an assertive pop culture. The duo regularly collaborates with the music industry. At Le Portique, in a redesigned space, they invite visitors to view a dozen of the clips they have produced. We come across Air, Sébastien Tellier, The Avalanches, Katerine, Justice, etc... Drawings in red and black complete the picture. They all evoke the world of music: a logo for a radio show, a poster for a band, an idea for a video clip, a portrait of a musician, etc.... «All set against a bubble-gum pink background. Moving on to color... the world is no longer exclusively black and white. A new palette takes over in the animated films, in the publishing work, but also in the practice ofwall drawing, which plays as much on colors as on scales,»the idea being to impress the visitor and contrast with the other formats presented in the exhibition.» The motif? A forest of upside-down feet arranged in a staircase that rises and falls in a range of pop colors against a black background.» The feet are narrative trails, protagonists suggested, bodies sketched out, figures touched upon. An invitation to start the dream machine. «We could be in a Blake Edwards film, in a shoe store, in the choreography of a musical or in the living room of a foot fetishist», the artists list. Like cave art,wall drawing invites us to explore, to decipher a world populated by signs and lines, in search of a language, a narrative that it’s up to each of us to elaborate and reconstitute.

In the course of their stay, Mrzyk & Moriceau discovered that many Jamaicans, in exchange for a few bucks, were gifted with clairvoyance, using ever-changing methods. And so it was that an ageless old lady, meticulously observing their hems, revealed to them that a magic seed was hidden in a second-hand remote control at the Annotto Bay flea market. She advised them to find the seed. A ska renter saw through a bubble of chewing gum to a subdivision where children play underground: a subdivision of cigarette butts. Or, looking at the shadow of his hutia, a little boy alerted them to the risk of a fatal scuba dive involving defective flipper moccasins, to be avoided at all costs during their stay. A band of mussels also had a vision in exchange for a few cigarettes: caution, artists had to be very careful about the choice of pins they used to hang their drawings. Some were bewitched and could contaminate the paper. As a result, these molds advised them to use Jamaican Patafix, a useful multi-purpose paste. The cross-section of a QR code hair also told us a lot about the future of our artistic couple. The ceiling absolutely had to be raised, the screens were growing in. The predictions were getting stranger and stranger...

While the title of the Never Dream of Dying exhibition evokes two recurring themes in Mrzyk and Moriceau’s drawings - dreams and death - it is also, and above all, a reference to 007. «For each solo show, we use a James Bond title. We like that classy, grandiloquent feel. There’s always a reference to love, death or revenge.» The three-part exhibition invites visitors to discover creation in all its forms: from studiolaboratory to commissioned work, via in situ practice linked to the exhibition space. These three phases merge in space, offering visitors a vast panorama of Mrzyk & Moriceau’s work.