On the occasion of the 2024 edition of Art-o-rama in Marseille, the gallery Spiaggia Libera presents the exhibition Moonlight & Sunburn by Marilou Poncin, which explores the representation of the female body in the digital age. Through a dialogue between the real and the virtual, the tangible and the imagined, the artist examines how new technologies transform our perception of femininity, desire, and identity.

At the heart of the exhibition is a mural created by artificial intelligence, capturing the distinctive light of southern France, particularly that of Marseille. The city is hinted at through fragments of Marseille’s architecture, bathed in this warm and vibrant light that colors the beach and tints every corner with a Mediterranean intensity. This sky, stretching out as a backdrop, becomes a projection surface for dreams and reveries, a space where anything seems possible. It invites visitors to lose themselves in an undefined horizon and to explore the depths of the unconscious.

On the right wall, a large self-portrait of the artist stands, surrounded by symbolic elements such as a coffee table on which a seashell is placed, reminiscent of a skeletal structure. Marilou Poncin’s body evokes the depths of the sea, covered in organic silt, algae, and earth. This drapery, inspired by classical painting, shapes the figure of an aquatic nymph, an enigmatic and dreamlike vision of femininity.

The female body, at times seeming to emerge from the depths, at times blending into the landscape, becomes ambiguous. Is she a statue frozen in time or an entity ready to come to life, as in certain mythological legends? The artist plays with this uncertainty, questioning the availability of the female body, offered up to the gaze, ready to satisfy the desires of the other, particularly those of the male perspective.

Around this self-portrait revolves a series of works—ceramics and drawings—that question the representation of the female body. These images, sometimes sourced from old pornographic magazines, sometimes captured by the artist herself, defy dating. Poncin reappropriates these images, integrating them into a new dreamlike narrative that transcends their initial function as projections of male desire. She gives them new life through a more poetic lens, one less confined to a purely erotic dimension.

Marilou Poncin’s instinctive work with color and material creates organic works where sensations blend with textures. The exhibition, as its title Moonlight & Sunburn suggests, plays on the idea of duality—the moon and the sun, surface and depth, visible and invisible. This alternation is reflected in the lighting of the pieces, often set between sunset and sunrise, suspended moments where time seems to stretch, where everything becomes blurred and indefinable.

Figures of naiads and aquatic nymphs appear throughout the exhibition, like dreamlike visions deposited on the surface of the water. Seashells and droplets, recurring elements in Marilou Poncin’s work, give physical form to the liquid, creating an immersive sensory experience. The artist plays with the viewer’s senses, using organic textures to provoke a tactile and emotional reaction. These elements become mirages, illusions that float between two worlds, just like the indefinable light that bathes the central sky mural.

Marilou Poncin is an artist whose work explores our fantasies in the age of new technologies. Her pieces feature camgirls, avatars, love dolls, and influencers—female figures that populate the digital imagination. Each fantastical world she creates reveals our individual and collective relationships with the societies we live in, encompassing tastes, desires, lacks, and prejudices.
Manipulating video, photography, painting, and ceramics, Marilou Poncin intersects different formats and mediums. Through enlargements and accumulations of images, she reduces the distance between her subjects and the viewers, offering them a tactile experience of images and bodies. Moonlight & Sunburn embodies this approach, inviting visitors to navigate between visible and invisible realities, exploring the reflections of a tangible world and the mirages of a fertile imagination.

Sacha Guedj-Cohen