| My works play with questioning the reality of the world around us. What things are hiding from us? What things are blocking our view? It is a game of shifting absence and presence that makes certainties fragile. |  |
Jules Julien’s solo show Cadavres Exquis was on view at Diesel Denim Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, in August 2009.
My works play with questioning the reality of the world around us. What things are hiding from us? What things are blocking our view? It is a game of shifting absence and presence that makes certainties fragile.
I have developed a very photographic style, a dimension between the reality of picture and the unreality of drawing: a space of doubts. Voluntarily pop and aesthetic, my work plays with codes under the shiny surface, where there is a hidden world. I place elements in tension in order to show a type of poetic irony.
For example, the Big Dick series was created to illustrate an article with the same title for the French gay magazine Têtu. The collages apply directly to the title, men with huge cocks, but those weird couples also show us another view on the subject: decapitated men hug with their partners made of huge dicks, companions as much as they are accomplices.
Another example, Love You, shows two hands wrapping a paper on which is written “love you;” the scene comes to cancel the words and throws confusion on reality and the durability of feelings.
For the Welcum series, I worked with Brett Lloyd for the shooting and the casting of androgynous boys. I wanted to talk about sex without sex, to disconcert, to abandon the gender question and only show the oblivion that there is in pleasure, in “la petite mort” (“little death,” as we say in France).
My show at the Diesel Denim Gallery Aoyama in Tokyo, Japan, is my first solo exhibition. I have worked on fashion and the power of clothes. Tokyo is a city where life is intensely lived. Styles are crossed and associated and become a happy, creative mix. Fashion is taken very seriously, but those clothes that we take care to choose every morning, what do they hide, what role do we give them? What do we want to show by wearing them?
The exhibition is called Cadavres Exquis, and it is made up of a movie of an ever-changing silhouette, prints extracted from the movie, and an installation called Narcisse, made of 1,000 giant mirror flakes in polished aluminum in the orifices of a pierced skull. Displayed on the floor, the lights’ reflection in those mirrors creates death skulls on the gallery’s walls. The predominance of the color pink and the details of the drawings contribute to give, at first, a “kawai” (cute) impression. It is the second time in which emerges the frightening aspect of the precious characters as lifeless, doll-like scarecrows.
I do not try to give answers through my work, only questions. I’m like a spectator who would invite you to take his place, to let you have his point of view.
