ONE SIZE FITS ALL

NATHALIE TALEC

September is usually one of the highlights of fashion in Paris. But this year, with the cancellation of Fashion Week, galleries will not turn into show rooms for the occasion. Opposite (since it has never rented its space on these occasions), Maubert Gallery dedicates an exhibition to a very particular line of clothing: at the same time singular clothes, down jackets against the cold, practicable sculptures and places of performances Nathalie Talec's objects return to the primary function of clothing: protect.

The mask and the clothing - and in their wake, the hidden and the protection - have always been part of the scientific-fictional, poetically frozen universe, of an artist, attracted by the poles and lulled by the ancient and modern stories of explorers such as Paul-Émile Victor. In search of original purity and fascinated by the action of the cold, Nathalie Talec experiments the questions of perception - meaning, emotions, interactions - and the synesthetic links that lead us from touching to waking dream. If, from the 1980s, she posed alongside her "inventions" (such as the "cold earth distance observing telescope" or the "storm microphone", made in 1986 with the equipment of Paul-Emile Victor) , the series of clothing-sculptures GIMME SHELTER Collection, started in 2019 for the Coup de Foudre exhibition at the EDF Foundation, in duet with Fabrice Hyber, continues to ask the question of the ritual object allowing the passage of the body to the spirit: so these giant puffer jackets must be seen as emotional shelters, where the spirit can take refuge. Just like, for example, the ritual costumes of the Tierra del Fuego Indians.