BREST.- Juliette Dennemont (1995, Saint Pierre in Réunion) spent 3 months at Passerelle under the reciprocal residency scheme: Breizh – Renyon ‘From one ocean to another’. In 2024, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain and La Cité des Arts in Réunion together created this residency for research and experimentation in the visual arts to offer emerging artists from Réunion a residency in Brest and those from Brittany a residency in Saint-Denis in Réunion. This demonstrates our firm commitment to encouraging the collaboration and movement of artists across different territories.

Juliette Dennemont is a painter and originally from Réunion. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2020, and mainly uses the airbrush technique, a tool that sprays paint using compressed air. She learned this from a fairground artist in order to rethink and update the design of her family’s fairground rides. Her work is imbued with this festive, popular world in both her choice of colours and the techniques she uses for certain of her subjects.

For the Vertigo exhibition, Juliette Dennemont presents a selection of the works she produced during her residency in Brest, taking inspiration from Breton landscapes and the Breton imagination and intermingling fauna from her home island. The exhibition title refers to the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo in which the vertigo effect involves subverting a scene by zooming in and moving the camera, creating a fluid background that causes a feeling of malaise in the viewer. Juliette Dennemont takes ownership of this effect, producing a worrying strangeness in her legendary Breton tales. A recent visit to the forgotten village of Keranflec’h in Finistère inspires in her certain motifs and perceptions as so many ghostly presences in a surreal decor. As a counterpoint, the technique and subjects recall the virtual atmosphere of video games, especially the MMORPGs of the 2010s and their heroic fantasy plots or the pixelated world of Minecraft.

Juliette Dennemont is originally from Réunion and moved from her home island at 18 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, she learned oil painting, sculpture, and woodworking. At the same time, her father, who worked in the carnival industry, encouraged her to learn airbrushing from a carnival decorative painter. This experience was a turning point in her artistic journey. Today, Juliette is a dedicated visual artist and also works as a painter-decorator within the carnival scene.

Inspired by Creole culture, Juliette's artwork blends various mediums such as drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. This diverse approach allows her to share and tell different myths and stories—some drawn from art history and carnival traditions, others from Creole and island cultures. Using airbrushing, she creates vibrant, fantastical worlds filled with unique, hybrid creatures.