UNE JUPE SE LÈVE ET UN RIRE
2025
Oratoire, 2025. ceramic, wood, 285 x 236 x 110, Cur. Ulysse Feuvrier, 62 rue Saint-Sabin, Paris (FR)
One must imagine entering a silent room, almost too silent. The air is thick with expectation, as if something had taken place, or was about to occur. At the center, alone, a ceramic sculpture. It resembles a prie-dieu, an altar placed there like a displaced relic, escaped from a ritual whose instructions have been lost. But on closer inspection, something unsettles. The formal language is familiar, but the signs are murky. This is not devotional furniture, it is an enigma.
And then, slowly, a name imposes itself: Baubo. The laughing old woman, obscene, matrix of subversion. In opposition to the great heroic divinities, Baubo embodies an underground power: that of the belly, of laughter, of the vulva displayed as the ultimate antidote to death. She whose grimaces and unveiled sex restored Demeter’s taste for life, when the goddess was consumed by grief for her daughter Persephone. It was not a miracle, but laughter. An eruption of body, an interruption of pathos by the grotesque. Baubo does not console, she disarms.
This sculpture erects a manifestation of female bodies, one that is looked upon by another woman, cared for by another. The symbioses mixing bees and sows reposition and displace the anthropic prism and carry it toward a community of movements and holds where, regardless of species, man and male are expelled from this desiring garden.
The imperfect gesture extends Baubo’s earthly materiality. This body that defies divine order through joyful obscenity becomes here a theoretical pivot: Baubo is not a marginal detail of mythology, she is a fissure in the structure of the classical narrative, a grating voice in the silence of rites.
Margot Anquez Bariseau summons a multitude of Gothic and Romanesque ornamental references that seem anachronistic to this ancient deity. These motifs, figures, and vignettes that punctuate this reliquary have no fixed historical point, they are unbound from it and serve this cult that questions us. Where one expects prostration, it proposes derision. In place of deference, it shows a way of praying, of praying to one another, of speaking to the spiritual through multilateral rites. Where one expects transcendence, it offers the friction of the earthly, the jubilation of the low. In this, this work questions the very status of the sacred: what if the obscene were a form of transcendence? What if the divine could emerge from a deliberately grotesque unveiling, from a corporeal reversal of solemn language?
This artistic gesture inscribes itself in a critical archaeology of ritual. In the manner that Monique Wittig, in The Lesbian Body or The Straight Mind, deconstructs the structures of language and the myths that confine bodies in gendered difference, this work acts as a counter-speech, a disobedience to the dominant narrative. Baubo’s sculpture, by exhibiting the body as a site of knowledge and not as an object of the gaze, rewrites the very syntax of the sacred. Contact with matter, the raw, thick ceramic, becomes an act of emancipation: a reconquest of language through flesh. Here, prayer becomes insubordinate, worship turns against its own order, and Baubo’s laughter becomes a manifesto. It is no longer a goddess who shows herself, but an incarnate speech, unbound from the masculine, that rises in matter to affirm that the body can be a site of linguistic and political resistance.
Contact with matter; the rough, tactile, archaic ceramic, itself becomes a form of summoning the forgotten ghosts of mythology. It is an altar without worship, a temple for a goddess without dogma, a sculptural gesture that surpasses liturgy.
Text by | Ulysse Feuvrier
Baubô, 2025. ceramic, 2025, 63 x 26 x 25, Cur. Ulysse Feuvrier, 62 rue Saint-Sabin, Paris (FR)
Oratoire, 2025. ceramic, wood, 285 x 236 x 110, Cur. Ulysse Feuvrier, 62 rue Saint-Sabin, Paris (FR)
Baubô, 2025. ceramic, 2025, 63 x 26 x 25, Cur. Ulysse Feuvrier, 62 rue Saint-Sabin, Paris (FR)