After her very ironic series of cosmetic plants: Phylloplasty, shown in Chaumont in 2010, Karine Bonneval is taking advantage of a large-scale in situ work at the art centre la Maréchalerie to extend her work as a baroque botanist. The art centre houses a greenhouse where a whimsical experiment takes place: plants develop with animal characteristics and their shape of eyelashes, hair and manicured nails is deliberately human.

For her exhibition at Galerie Martine et Thibault de la Chatre entitled Hybrides Véhicules Karine Bonneval shows a series of installations, sculptures and images born of a reflection on the relationship between the living and the mechanical. Thus, porcelain sculptures representing objects linked to the automobile are spiked with cereals for agro-fuels and embody a completely artificial life. These precious fetishes of modernity combine a universe where vanity and the will to power are articulated.

Also presented in this exhibition are the first images of a series on the costumes of explorers. Halfway between camouflage and disguise, these outfits are staged in domesticated natural spaces. They reveal the strangeness of the geometric assemblage of well-aligned forests and the orthodoxy of cultivated fields.

Karine Bonneval's ambivalent objects reject the approximations and naivety of anthropomorphic representations of nature; they show that the "necessary" link between man and nature, the "symbiosis" that ecology wishes to be "harmonious", is driven first and foremost by a desire for control.

Juliette Cortes

Granola, in Canadian, means cereal eater. This Ford Mustang engine was made in porcelain during an Arts du Feu residency at ENSA Limoges under the direction of Christian Couty between 2009 and 2010.
The porcelain is reminiscent of a food container, and evokes the rise in the price of vegetable raw materials following speculation around agro-fuels. Feeding engines seems to be the height of contemporary absurdity, and is one of the factors behind the global food crisis of 2007-08.