Gallery Mathilde Le Coz presents for the first time the work of the sculptor Leticia Martínez Pérez and the painter Garance Matton during an exhibition designed by two, where ceramics and paintings respond and enrich each other. The artists, Spanish and French, open the doors of their secret garden to us - affable, welcoming, sensual, they take us into a slightly magical, slightly bizarre upside-down world where all fantasies are allowed.

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While all the pieces in this exhibition were created hand in hand, the link between the two artists dates back to 2019, the year they met during a residency in Madrid. Garance Matton, then in search of new subjects, began to paint the sculptures of Leticia Martínez Pérez, which she staged, sometimes carried by her, sometimes placed on a chessboard like pawns in a magic game. The painter thus offers the sculptor's pieces - mostly ceramics used as props during performances orchestrated by Leticia Martínez Pérez - a new setting, a new story, a new life. And their aesthetic complicity is such that Garance Matton sometimes paints without saying a word the scene that Leticia Martínez Pérez had imagined in volume for her pieces.

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“Le fruit permis” is an opportunity to continue this natural complicity, to nourish these spontaneous exchanges, to continue to weave the web of this fabulous universe on the fringes of surrealism, fantasy and magical realism. If the forms of Leticia Martínez Pérez are found under the brush of Garance Matton, it is now the palette of the painter who comes to invade the pieces of the sculptor. And the exchanges are not only formal and pictorial: for this exhibition, Garance Matton was introduced to the technique of ceramics with her partner.

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Between wall sculptures and painted objects, enigmatic totems and checkerboards, blurred shapes and perspectives, the artists invite us to go to the other side of the mirror, to dive headfirst into a dreamlike sensual fiction. A shared metaphysical aesthetic that smacks of fantasy and dream and which reveals an elementary, almost ontological aspect of the artists' work. Leticia Martínez Pérez starts from the psychoanalytical tests of Rorschach (1) to create her ceramic wall plaques, thus probing the unconscious and the capacities of association of her spectators. Garance Matton plays with checkerboards and through her plans on perspective and often inserts measuring instruments, such as compasses and pendulums into her paintings - she seems to question the time and space that govern earthly existence.

Diversion and humor are never far away: Leticia Martínez Pérez's sculptures are both cat trees and apotropaic totems, fruits and gaping sexes, elf slippers and sauceboats. Garance Matton's hands are sacred and players, her tents take the form of fairground cupolas and could house a 16th century Virgin and Child as much as a magic show. In addition, the incorporation in her painting of supernatural elements - strips of color, rectangles, abstract shapes - only reinforces the precariousness of the viewer's landmarks and, in fact, the evocative power of her canvases. For Garance Matton and Leticia Martínez Pérez, the works take on meaning in the imagination of the viewer - the two artists play on the projective capacity of their spectators.

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With “Le fruit permis” Leticia Martínez Pérez and Garance Matton sign a medieval pop exhibition, on the heels of the supernatural, just let yourself go in Alice's “house of the Mirror”, the one where everything is weird and nothing forbidden.

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1 At the beginning of the 20th century, plates representing symmetrical ink blots were presented to patients for interpretation, the analysis of the responses made it possible to probe the unconscious of the subjects.