CAC Brétigny

Croix de bois, croix de fer
05.12.26—03.02.27
Anaïs Fontanges and Matteo Louisy-Ravel

📍 Espace Jacques Brel
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

From Tuesday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. (Closed during the end-of-year holidays).

Opening: Saturday 5 December, 2 pm–6 pm. Free admission.

          Haven't we all, at some point, collected images, amassing them in a binder or digital folder, feeling they might one day form a narrative? This practice of collecting lies at the heart of Anaïs Fontanges and Matteo Louisy-Ravel's work.

          In their first exhibition in an art centre in France, the two artists place images from their respective collections in dialogue: the skeleton, the tomb effigy or the soldier. These allegorical figures are present across a wide array of visual registers, from art history to popular culture, via countless images circulating on the internet. They belong, first and foremost, to a familiar imaginary, that of play and childhood: little toy soldiers that we line up, Halloween figurines that we collect or strategy board games like Risk. But behind these playful forms hide older, darker stories. The skeleton, the tomb effigy and the soldier carry with them a history marked by war, death and memory. This coexistence between serious subjects and their playful representations feeds into the artists' reflections.

          Bringing together drawings, sculptures and installations, the exhibition draws on the conventions of childhood in order to subvert them. Several of the scale models, for example, invite us to experiment with changes in scale, to take hold of a miniature world or recreate logics of strategy and staging. The exhibition seeks neither to condemn nor reassure. It allows attraction and unease, the gentleness of play and the violence of the images to coexist. For why do skeletons amuse us so much? Why are soldiers turned into toys? What do these images, which we have been handling since childhood without really looking at them, tell us?

Anaïs Fontanges was born in 1998 in Portugal. A Franco-Spanish artist, she graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024. Anaïs Fontanges works across drawing, sculpture and video. She collects images, drawings and objects in personal archives, which she continually draws from. These artworks question our relationship with the constant stream of images, with the forgetting associated with the overabundance of information, as well as overproduction.

Matteo Louisy-Ravel was born in 1998 in Marseille. He graduated from the École des Arts décoratifs de Paris in 2023. Through a visual practice that combines video, drawing and installation, Matteo Louisy-Ravel seeks to tell stories that explore power dynamics. Drawing on archetypes from popular culture, figures from the internet, paintings and commedia dell’arte stand facing the world, like children's toys placed in a scale model.

Anaïs Fontanges and Matteo Louisy-Ravel have been working as a duo since 2024. Together, they have been developing a practice centred on installation and video performance.