Les veilleurs

With Les veilleurs, Aurélie Menaldo plays with the window as a type of space that contains, preserves, allows the gaze but prevents access.

The installation brings together three wrought iron elements and was created specifically for the exhibition space, according to its dimensions. The metal has already been used by the artist in public spaces, such as for the installation Éole, a set of turnstiles transposed from the world of consumption and supermarkets to that of parks and games (2016).

Aurélie Menaldo works here with metal from pre-existing forms that she diverts and recycles: the ironwork elements were recovered from window gratings and balconies, chosen for their ornamental shapes and their possible assembly.

The diversion of architectural elements is very present in the artist’s work – such as for the columns of the installation Paradis perdus, 2022. Here, it is a question of going from a security device that protects the windows to a simple decorative element. The artist transforms the object, bringing it to an elsewhere. The more we use the same thing, the more containment or protection for bodies there is: we look at the locked window bars in turn. The object is therefore no longer a functional defense grid but an object of looks whose role is to tend towards an absurd poetics.

In her latest installations, Aurélie Menaldo uses a vocabulary that plays on the border between function, ornament and spirituality. The title bears the ambiguity of the word ‘watchman’: guardian, holy as a security guard.

We could talk about these vigils as urban relics in a secular dimension. The goal is to keep the raw appearance of the material and the precious aspect of the shape.

This symbolic principle is found in the burnt wood installation Palo Santo (2025) or in the work Entre-peaux (2025), a series of animal masks made of latex and wax. These sculptures are shown on the wall in a tight space. Neither a hunting trophy nor a possible costume set, each one studded with delicate wax tears. The close proximity of the body and the works heightens awareness of their fragility.

For Les veilleurs, Aurélie Menaldo is interested in the rigidity and solidity of materials as sometimes unthought rules. Between fear and confinement, where protection is also separation, it questions our ways of making architecture, the city and society.

Text of Pascale Riou, for the exhibition in galery Showcase, Grenoble

welded wrought iron elements. 107 x 147 x 9 cm