Bibliothèque is a duo-show organised by Crèvecoeur, introducing Julien Carreyn and Naoki Sutter-Shudo for the first time in Milan.

“As a child I often played the Ravensburger original memory game. We would find pairs of pictures, drawings of bananas, close-up photos of matches... The back of these cards, about 5 cm square, was speckled blue on a white background. Was this the material the designers had found to evoke memory? The texture looked like the wriggling snow on the TV screen after the programmes had finished”, — Julien Carreyn, 2021.

Originally trained as a publisher, Julien Carreyn (born 1973, FR) is a painter, photographer and video artist. In his works, he evokes the memory of a French childhood: rural villages, abandoned town halls, municipal libraries or youth hostels are the main elements. In this way, he produces a timeless and singular story, thanks to a double approach, photographic and pictorial.For the exhibition Bibliothèque, Julien Carreyn has produced three-tiered shelves in white woodon which he places small pictorial objects, similar to small psychedelic blotters. He also presents a new series of photographic works (barred prints) documenting municipal library rooms. Between blurred memories of bathroom cabinets and afterimages of the pages of an illustrated book, the object fades away in favour of its content: flashing, persistent images on invisible lines.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s (born 1989, FR/JP) sculpture is direct and sensitive. That is to say, it has, at first glance, a form of formal evidence, a silent eurythmics, which contrasts with the multiplicity of small narratives, whispered intimate references, coincidences or déjà-vus that seem to have composed it.

Each of the works presented in Bibliothèque rests on a quasi-impossible equilibrium, whether it isa question of physical properties, iconography, or meaning. They oscillate between the fatality of gravity and a brazen verticality, between a nonchalant suppleness and a lacquered vigour, between a natural environment and a meticulously constructed architecture, between a profane and a sacred aspect, and it seems that one could enumerate these antitheses endlessly. Antitheses that can rather be seen as correspondences, as intrepid attempts of reconciliation. The notions co-exist, thus creating a language of their own, which is as far away as possible from a Manichean statement.