Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead

Jennetta Petch (UK) & Szymon Kula (Poland), visual artists, have been collaborating as a duo since they moved to Lyon in 2018. Both studied painting at The Glasgow School of Art (Scotland, United Kingdom). ), where they met. Following a four-month residency at the Factatory in 2020, they left Lyon to settle in Embrun, in the Southern Alps.

Through their works Szymon Kula and Jennetta Petch summon matter like a specter suggesting a bygone time. Artists explore new relationships with the elements and to do so focus their attention on widely proven and sometimes even industrialized artisanal know-how. The works exist in their most obvious physicality - that which catches the eye during the exhibition - but otherwise overflow in order to reach their substrates present in their original natural environments. Thus, the works speak again. They affirm a chosen insularity and a new material life in some way. They have the desire to deconstruct the conversion of art into capital – a revealing phenomenon of the post-oil era. To do this, artists notably develop the reenactment of past gestures. The links of social, emotional or moral dependence are brought to light. The gesture is archived in the living. His disappearance is averted, his replacement is assured. The future nevertheless remains speculative because the interrelation between innovation and preservation appears to be most unstable. Arlène Berceliot Courtin, January 2022.