SALO XIII

Press release

It’s interesting to look at the genesis of these erotic salons, which were created by chance. The very first salon was a joke. We opened an exhibition space in Romainville in 2007, at a time when contemporary art had yet to make its mark in the town, far from it. It was a salting house, hence the name of the association, which we ran with three photographers: Adel Tincelin, Aurélie Veyron and myself. We gave each other carte blanche to give free rein to each other’s interests.
The young people at the vocational college, which was located opposite the salt works, called it “the house of the pig” because a pig was drawn on the façade. In the eight years we ran the place, we put on around fifty exhibitions, and during one of my carte blanche periods, I decided to organise a ‘pig’ exhibition, a show of erotic drawings. It was a bit of a joke, because salons weren’t very fashionable and eroticism was totally out of fashion. Nonetheless, the show worked quite well from the outset, which inspired me to repeat it every year in the form of a call for applications without a CV.

With changing mores, a new respect for non-gendered people and the #Metoo movement, the salo (which also means pig fat in Ukrainian) show has taken on new twists, with fewer pornographic entries. What is on offer today are intimate, personal atmospheres and colourful, erotic fantasies. It is to be hoped that the depiction of the bodies of anonymous, unentitled women, children and men will become rarer. In fact, a large proportion of the artists exhibiting at this show are reclaiming an eroticism that has been destroyed or stolen from them, and this can sometimes be seen in the pieces on show.

Artists work on the shadows of society, on the unspoken, on what has been lost and what is missing from life. It’s a power of repair and reconstruction through art, hence the need for this show.

Laurent Quénéhen, commissaire de Salo XIII