Dominique Pétrin
Pompeii MMXIX

On the occasion of her first solo show at Galerie Charlot, artist Dominique Pétrin takes over the gallery's space with her dazzling in situ installations. Made of silkscreened paper, cut and glued to the wall, Dominique Pétrin's installations cover the entire surface of the walls and floor to create an immersive environment. These silkscreened paper frescoes are freely inspired by Greco-Roman ones, and include printed elements referring to domestic life and our consumer society. The installations develop into a virtual architecture referencing the visual configuration of digital interfaces and Internet space. Analog and digital merge, real and fiction mix, the viewer's gaze is disturbed by this trompe-l'oeil and put in a mise en abyme between true and false. The artist describes her installations as a contemporary "theatre of the imagination", where objects of mass consumption, electronic devices, surveillance apparatus, plants, medicines and other everyday objects are staged. Domestic and virtual space merge, the screen no longer being a barrier between real and virtual, but a frontier that the artist enjoy to cross over and over, collecting new elements each time. Superimposed windows, toolbars, banners, columns, data and 3D objects underpin the architecture of her aesthetics yet surprisingly analog in its execution. Its motifs, a kind of digital tapestries that cover the walls and floor, play with the archaeology of digital technology, strictly linked to the loom, but also with the contemporary history of design, from Eduardo Paolozzi to the Memphis Group.
Dominique Pétrin's environments are very colourful, pop and apparently naive geometric spaces, but which reveal in a second respect a certain unease and detachment. Lucid dream, psychotropic experience or bad-trip?

Valentina Peri, 2019