PARIS.- "Le Foyer (etymologically, “the domestic hearth” in French) underwent an unprecedented revolution in the 1960s when the washing machine, a symbol of women’s liberation, was widely introduced. With this series, Rose Barberat pens a sarcastic ode to this everyday machine. For the artist, it is when the washing machine is shared that it best reveals the blind spots in our social interactions. The launderette therefore serves as the ultimate common place, as this series of large format canvases shows, offering a delirious foray into this place of collective intimacy.

Real life elements are intermittently spread across the white space of the gallery. “Beyond a simple image and setting,” explains the artist, “this is a first attempt at an installation.” In the form of a pictorial story, she sketches a new kind of totem path, depicting half flying machines, half useful objects, around which numerous rituals take place on a daily basis. These strange machines echo science fiction utopias and the imagery of book illustrations and fanzines from the 1970s. The origin of this motif can be seen in Kubrick, Orwell, or even the futurists that came before the cult of human augmentation. (...)" Sophie Bernal

This is precisely what is reflected in the canvas Inertia, which shows the central drum spinning the body of a man (her brother), who is subjected to the mechanisms of the machine. The nude form, shown in four different poses, suggests speed and reminds us of human subservience to technique, which will soon be replaced by technology. Moreover, the successive allusion to this allegory for care (the washing machine which has been long associated with femininity) and to the mental load that has long been the responsibility of women, combined with strength (the masculine musculature), serve to question representations of gender identity.

The four smallest canvases, entitled The Vestal Series, continue this theme. Ironically presented in honour of Vesta, ancient goddess of the home and family, they subtly shift the perspective to reveal new deified objects. If the pieces are reminiscent of the atomic era’s fascination with the conquest for a new world and the promise of plastic offered by progress with petrochemistry, it is because space age design engendered social utopia, in the same way as the widespread introduction of washing machines in post-industrial homes. The polished round form of the spinning drums, a barely concealed nod to spatial imagery, combines with the characteristic orange and white duotone of the period. Rose Barberat’s work is full of these multiple references; it is also reminiscent of 1960s pop art in the way that it questions our relationship with day-to-day objects.

In the wake of the realist tradition and its focus on trompe-l’œil, Rose Barberat’s paintings have multiple layers: archetypes, signs, and symbols that blend without hierarchy. The pictorial space becomes a place of associated codes, fragmented identities, and individual and shared stories. Sometimes anachronistic, and often contradictory, the images conjured up create worlds which are neither totally familiar, nor totally alien to us.

Rose Barberat (born in 1994 in Saint-Claude, France) works at Poush, Aubervilliers. She holds a degree in Modern Literature, a Master’s in Literary Creation from the University of Cergy-Pontoise, and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021.

Rose Barberat is represented by the PACT Gallery, which offered her very first solo exhibition in 2021. In the meantime, the artist has participated in exhibitions at the Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, the MOCO La Panacée in Montpellier in 2023, the Givon Art Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, the Jo-hs Gallery in Mexico where she also resided, at Venice during the Biennale with the T&L Gallery, and at Poush Manifesto in Clichy in 2022.

Barberat develops a figurative pictorial vocabulary using references to the narrative, the genre of the novel and more specifically to autofiction. In her work, she seeks to provoke a shift, a disorder where doubt interferes between what is probable and what is real. Her paintings are conceived as objects of contemplation and discuss the idea of an artificial staging based on real facts. The artist creates fictions from documents taken from photographic sources. Starting from an image allows her to discuss the seduction it exerts, while giving an idea several appearances, several versions that lead to painting.