Eva Jospin
Le Quotidien de l'Art

 

"Spectacular. These are the least of the words that could describe the journey through 15 works by Eva Jospin (born in 1975) in the Grand Palais gallery. Punctuated by a succession of cardboard maquettes—the artist’s favored material, whose qualities she has explored for nearly 20 years—and by embroidered bas-reliefs that renew her practice toward a colorful textile art, enhancing the monochrome décors that have become her signature, the exhibition yields to the temptation of the monumental. At its heart stands Dôme (2022), a seven-meter-high structure, and Cénotaphe (2020), erected like a funerary edifice, before concluding with Panorama (2016), a nine-meter trompe-l’œil forest cut with a blade, originally shown in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre.

 

Eva Jospin skillfully invokes a narrative point of departure through which the “grotesque” of the exhibition can be understood. A legend recounts that in 15th-century Italy, a young man fell into a cavity where he discovered the remains of Emperor Nero’s golden palace. While grottesco thus refers to this decorative style—interweaving architectural and vegetal motifs drawn from these ruins, which delighted Raphael and influenced Baroque gardens—the grandiloquent scenography says much about the spirit of the times: it invites us to marvel at a decorative, teeming art that opens like an enchanted parenthesis—one might think of the world of Alice or of heroic fantasy—."