CAC Brétigny

Lettres du quotidien – Extraits, débuts, jeux, traces
by Malak El Zanaty Varichon and Mona Varichon
Curated by: Marion Vasseur Raluy (Director)

Opening 
Saturday, January 17th, 2–5 p.m. Free admission

▲ Espace de la Croix-Louis, Brétigny-sur-Orge
17.01—14.03.2026

The exhibition Lettres du quotidien - Extraits, débuts, jeux, traces (Letters from Everyday Life – Excerpts, Beginnings, Games, Traces) offers visitors the opportunity to discover the work of artists Malak El Zanaty Varichon and her daughter Mona Varichon. Their practices are  nourished by conversations and shared experiences of family and everyday life. The exhibition brings together a large body of work created by the two artists at different stages of their lives, between 1996 and 2025. Painted postcards and letters, collages composed of bits of children's drawings, photographs of their living and working spaces, vlogs  of everyday life and current events... creating is a way of discovering the world while shaping it, without hierarchy between child and adult and without any expectation of recognition.

An art workshop leader  since the early 1990s, Malak has worked mostly at the Atelier des Enfants at the Centre Pompidou, as well as in schools and healthcare institutions in and around Paris. Both in her workshops and with her own children, cultural mediation and sharing creativity on a daily basis feed her own relationship with art and her way of being an artist. Malak talks about "accompanying the desire to make, and making together " in an approach that is playful and joyful. For more than forty years, in parallel with her work  and family life, she has been creating collages, photographs, paintings and assemblages. For her part, Mona has been working for several years to gain recognition for her mother's work in the contemporary art world. Through studio visits, artists, gallery owners and exhibition curators close to Mona began discovering Malak's art folders filled with years of work. This led to invitations to exhibit from artists such as Louise Sartor, Asha Schechter, Cory Scozzari and Ethan Assouline, who were enthusiastic about both her career path and her formal creations. With this exhibition at CAC Brétigny, Malak will present her work in a French public institution for the first time. 

While she was studying art in America, Mona worked as an archivist for contemporary artists such as Laura Owens and Diana Thater. Working with them, she learnt the importance of documenting and archiving traces of both their practices and their epoch. She decided to apply this method to both her mother's work and her own production. When they were living far apart and in regular contact, Mona also began recording their telephone conversations, which would later become material for her first films. In parallel, her photographs document daily life, in which Malak plays a major role: at home, in the workplace, at the market.  She also looks at cities and their language, particularly through her series of photos of advertisements.

Malak and Mona blur the boundaries ordinarily drawn between amateur and professional practice, between private and urban space, between the art world and their free interpretation of it. This singular and disparate ensemble produces a perpetual exchange between the two women and the world, enabling the connection of life with what already belongs to yesterday, or what will happen in the future.  Emotion nestles itself into these works when they capture this shared time that is already slipping away from them.

Mona Varichon (born in Paris in 1989) is an artist and translator. She studied sociology at the Université Paris Descartes and fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute and the ArtCenter in Los Angeles. She creates videos, photographs and performances inspired by current events, social media, art history and popular art forms, to simultaneously recount and infiltrate the present. Her work circulates on YouTube, in shops, letterboxes, interiors, magazines, cinemas and art spaces. Alongside her brother Tymour, she runs the framing workshop Au Cadre d'or in Paris, founded by their father Jacques-Henry Varichon in 1979.
Her work was recently exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Mécènes du Sud in Montpellier, Fluentum in Berlin, the gallery Air de Paris in Romainville, Fondation Van Gogh in Arles, Capc in Bordeaux, the Villa Arson in Nice, Bel Ami, The Vanity Gallery and Kristina Kite in Los Angeles and Les Chichas de la Pensée in Pantin. Her films have been shown at the festival Écrans Documentaires in Vitry-sur-Seine, Festival Move at the Centre Pompidou, the Etna cinema in Montreuil and the Egyptian Theatre and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She has translated, into French, texts for exhibition catalogues on Pippa Garner, Betye Saar, Christina Ramberg and Cécile B. Evans, as well as the memoirs of the American artists George and Mike Kuchar. She was awarded the Ricard Prize in 2024. 

Malak El Zanaty Varichon (born in 1952 in Giza, Egypt) lives and works in Paris. From 1990 to 2021, she led visual art workshops with the non-profit organisation Art-Éveil in nursery and primary schools in and around Paris, for adults, marginalised populations and people with disabilities and at the Atelier des Enfants at the Centre Georges Pompidou. During all the years she spent in this much-loved workplace, she took advantage of her back-and-forths between the Atelier, the Centre's artworks and its windows overlooking the city to share with visitors from all walks of life an openness to knowledge of the world and of oneself through art, looking, talking and making . Through the years and various detours, she has developed her artistic practice in the folds of her professional and family life.
Her work has recently been exhibited at Treize in Paris, Air de Paris in Romainville, Cocotte in Treignac, the art fairs Paris Internationale and Systema in Marseille and the Vanity Gallery in Los Angeles.

Documents

• Lettres du quotidien—Press Release (pdf)