“You know that this is what happens all the time: they judge it to be ugly - that’s how I’ve been judged for twenty years. And they’re absolutely right, because it’s ugly. I, for one, think it’s much more interesting when it looks ugly, because you see the element of struggle in it. ” ¹

Sarah Tritz has dreamed up a personal art show in which her new pieces are exhibited in dialogue with works by 29 other guest artists, a display whose connecting thread is the body as a container, like a box whose idiom is one of its main tools. The show links what are normally viewed as two distinct forms of pleasure, allied and inseparable. There is erotic pleasure (glamour) as well as a cognitive one (grammar). Tritz brings together artists whose works openly and shamelessly call to us with an obvious physicality, like Liz Craft’s sculpture Me Princess, or the double self-portrait Gehirnstroeme (Brainwaves) by Maria Lassnig, an artist who has repeatedly taken herself as her subject yet has avoided complacency of any sort. Many of these artists dare to embody neurotic thinking and show a reciprocity between the attitude of the artist at work and what their works illustrate.

For her show, Tritz has selected a number of outsider artworks borrowed from the collections of LaM (the Lille Métropole musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut), which bring to light the construction of a line of thought. They are drawings and have a cathartic value, characteristically featuring writing, symmetry, and a clarity in the distinct outlines of the drawn shapes. These motifs are treated as given conceptual elements that attest to the power of language, however ungraspable it proves to be. 

Beyond the generations and backgrounds of the artists, both outsider and contemporary, Tritz has been putting together an eclectic corpus of work that looks like a network of esthetic complicities that reveal no divisions.

Further into the show, the artist exhibits face to face a series of new pieces envisioned as an interior, both mental and domestic. Inspired by the preciosity and fantasy of Art deco furniture, the artist has designed – drawing on the artisanal know-how of several fields – a buffet with all sorts of anthropomorphic embellishments, whose doors with their stylized expressions, and vulva-shaped handles, open onto an inner theater done in bronze. The artist has molded a box-garden like the model of a projection space, an inner garden.

Theatricality – long present in Tritz’s work – is expressed by a family of headless hand-sewn marionettes, for example, or a mini peepshow, or Theater Computer, simple jury-rigged computers boasting keyboards with unintelligible alphabets and equipped with two-sided screens. On their “windows”, the artist represents the demons and desires of characters guided by their needs, primitive, sexual and greedy.