Exhibition guide
Jardin d’Hiver #3. DECORAMA

It is now well established that ornamentation is an essential marker of humanity. Yet its value and legitimacy have always fuelled debates. Already in antiquity, Plato and Aristotle condemned it and returned it to favour respectively. Long viewed as either a simple and useless artifice, a symbol of the divine, or a vector of knowledge, ornament is closely linked to the concepts of function and beauty. For centuries it has fulfilled a moral role, too, with craftsmen, artists, and citizens adapting to the imposed decorative style of the day, a reflection of existing social and religious hierarchies.

Starting in the 20th century with the advent of Modernism, ornament –often assimilated to the merely decorative– was discredited and even derided by functionalist movements and elitist discourse. Major figures like the architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, and the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, took part in this questioning of ornamentation. At the same time, industrialisation and mechanisation, by making it easier to reproduce motifs ad infinitum, helped to relegate traditional craftsmanship –arts and crafts– to the status of “minor arts”.

Very early on, ornament raised questions concerning gender identity and sexual orientation. Associated with both personal adornment (what was once called “finery”) and the feminine, it has often been seen as a frivolity, a trifle that is excessive, out of place, even monstruous. Yet ever since Postmodernism, ornament has found a legitimate place in the field of so-called “major” art. In reality, it had never completely disappeared. It has remained present, often implicitly, as a formal, conceptual, even political strategy. The show DECORAMA brings together visual artists whose work uses ornament and decoration as tools meant to question the notions of taste, class, and gender. Whilst it may seem speculative to bring together such diverse practices within a common geography, the exhibition is part of a very long tradition in the Canton of Vaud that is linked to developing and promoting the decorative and applied arts.

This exhibition pays homage to Marc Camille Chaimovicz (1947, Paris–2024, London), who passed away just one year ago and whose work and ideas are what gave DECORAMA its start.

Exhibition web page

The work of Elie Autin springs from a multi-disciplinary practice that notably includes performance art. The series Gardiennes stands as an important moment in the creation of her visual works. It is a self-portrait/object, using an approach that involves meeting people who are looking at the piece. The work of art becomes then a potentiality in action, an extension of the body able to convey an intention, a story, a memory. In this series, protection and defence are central to the concept. Autin, moreover, brings in political and social dimensions, by reflecting on racism in particular. Using a narrative that is filled with a desire for emancipation, she summons Bacchantes and Furies, not as mere references but as the starting point for questioning certain oppressive Western discourses. The series is about deconstructing normative stories and opening up a space for other voices, bodies, and mythologies.

Forever changing, Lake Geneva offers a series of views and chromatic variations that Caroline Bachmann translates into shapes and colours. The artist pays close attention to weather phenomena and their influence on the lake’s hues, and reveals, through the minute gradations of her paintings, a long-standing interest in the effects light has on different surfaces. Both figurative and synthetic, her painting takes its place in a long line of predecessors –from the Italian Renaissance to the American landscape painters of the early 20th century, especially Louis Michel Eilshemius– but without descending into mere homage. Her observations of the lake give rise to drawings together with precise notes on values, colours, forms and position of the stars and planets in the sky. Then in the privacy of her studio at the end of the night or very early in the morning, she paints these on-site notations.

Created for DECORAMA, a new series of wall sculptures made of synthetic hair echoes an assemblage of materials that sets the concepts of desire and disgust in tension. This is characteristic of works by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Like the inert mass of shiny hair, the impos- ing faux leather curtain visitors discover in the show’s first gallery also plays with the act of confronting contradictory worlds. The materiality of this fabric –the star of fetishist circles– contrasts with the elaborate drapery suggesting the stately curtains of opulent 19th-century flats. The idea of ornament is likewise central to Salomania, a video piece in which choreographer Yvonne Rainer gives a dance lesson to the artist Wu Tsang. The “Dance of the Seven Veils” performed in the film Salomé (1923) by Alla Nazimova is subjected to multiple levels of reinterpretation –and with varying degrees of ornamentation– offering a striking contrast to the traditions of Post- modern dance.

The Casting of the Maids… (2012), a video piece by Marc Camille Chaimowicz shows us two women preparing to audition for Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947). When their mistress is out, the maids of the play, the sisters Solange and Claire, like to dress up in her clothes and flip the power dynamic of the household in a subversive act of role-playing. Whilst The Maids voices a biting critique of the bourgeoisie’s domination of the working class, it also explores, in a more secretive, latent way, the performativity of gender. Chaimowicz reinvents this tension in a carefully stylised home interior that is bathed in his “feminine” palette of pastel greens, pinks, and yellows. The two women go about their business amid a set of objects –jewellery, flowers, accessories, home decor items– which aestheticises femininity as something emancipated from the female body. Here femininity seems less like a biological or sexual category and more like a group of visual codes and gestures that can be embodied independently of any fixed or preconstructed identity.

Designed by Sebastián Dávila, these structures made of cut-out boxes for shipping and moving were inspired by the traditional architecture of his native Puerto Rico. La Mudanza (the move or moving in Spanish) conjures up the desire to return to the home country felt by the Puerto Rican diaspora. That urge is often frustrated by an unstable economy with ongoing privatisation and gentrification of the land, both of which tend to exclude the poorest classes amongst native Puerto Ricans. The ornamentation in this case –often involving plant and geometric patterns– uses the motifs that can be found on the gates around marquesinas, or carports. These transitory spaces were originally meant to hold an automobile but more often than not serve as a patio nowadays, the true key to community life on the island. The motifs, moreover, are also an allusion to colonial history whilst bearing traces of a variety of decorative cultures and styles that have flourished there. The unremarkable utilitarian aspect of the cardboard adds a sharp contrast to the monumentality of the on-site installation, whose central illumination creates a play of light on the museum’s walls. Freed from their mould, the projected motifs seem also to gain greater independence to rewrite their own story.

Confined to the limited volume of a museum gallery, Sarah Margnetti’s installation brings together wallpaper and two paintings the artist created for the exhibition, along with a third piece that is part of the MCBA collections. This immersive space invites us to think about point of view, the eye, and framing. Designed to be infinitely “connectable” and to generate new images, the wallpaper shows hands touching, entwined, or rub- bing each other in an infinite number of combinations. The motif is used again in Home Cinema (view from outside) and Home Cinema (view from inside), two paintings conceived as a very short series in which the same scene is presented from different angles. Central to the installation is the window –a recurring motif in her work– which concentrates the artist’s thinking. It is an opening to the outside and an aspiration to freedom, but also a withdrawal into or even a closing up of the self.

The motto “Toujours agité, jamais abattu” (equivalent to “Ever on edge, never despondent”) is written out on the rear pediment of the Villa Mon-Repos in Lausanne. It is the starting point of Julie Monot ’s piece Toujours Agitée, Jamais Abattue, which offers a critical and feminised rereading of the phrase. The artist has grafted onto the elegance of the dining room tablecloth of this bourgeois villa a pair of sumptuously dressed hands. These hands, though, belong to a disturbing creature that has come to trouble the hushed macho ambiance of the site, which was reconverted into an address for various municipal offices since the City of Lausanne acquired the property in the early years of the 20th century. Further inside the exhibition, a flower-headed figure overlooking the show immediately catches the eye. Its title is a reference to monkshood or aconite (Aconitum napellus), the deadliest plant of Europe, which is found notably in the Alps and grows wild in urban wastelands and empty lots. Monot, whose work frequently explores ambivalent zones, pays homage here to this majestic though highly poisonous flower which a number of ancient mythologies attributed magic powers to.

In his practice, Stéphane Nabil Petitmermet pays particular attention to the details of his paintings. In The Wrong Trousers, irregularities due to the artist’s hand in executing the picture’s motifs offer a sharp contrast with the rigidity of the system being applied. Those imperfections become the vehicle of a great emotional impact. Petitmermet stresses the importance of involving the hand in making a work of art, a means for conveying a certain sensibility. When repeated as a pattern or grid, that vector undercuts the narrative power of the image, giving way to a kind of authenticity that is closer to abstraction. In Antics, he takes up in particular the question of ornamentation as a channel of cultural identity and tool of collective memory. The presence everywhere of decorative elements in the households where his family lived in his native Beirut has naturally fed into his pictorial vocabulary. Long an excuse for paying homage to that past, his roots are now disappearing in his art and allowing a fresh approach take shape, one that is more grounded in pigment and workmanship. This imposes a more open finality on the painting.

Amongst the most universally recognised motifs, bricks are deeply anchored in the collective imagination. Their horizontal and vertical lines resist any purely abstract reading, since they inevitably make us think of some architectural and structural function. In Locus Suspectus 1 and 2, Guillaume Pilet reappropriates and diverts this association by transposing the motif to a fragile transparent material, glass. Conceptually the new image forms an obstruction in contrast to the sublimation that a stained- glass window normally signifies. The artist likewise selected from the MCBA collection sculptures by Frédéric Muller, Hansjörg Gisiger, Antoine Poncet, André Gigon, Marco Pellegrini, and Pierre Oulevay, which he sets next to his own ceramic works from a series he began in 2021 that includes approximate replicas of everyday objects. Pilet presents his installation on pedestals and invites us to think about the association of art and non-art, as well as figurative images’ unique ability to awaken a strange feeling of recognition. It is a concept that Freud theorised in his paper “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”, 1919), which he translated into Latin as locus suspectus.