Rose Vidal

Rose Vidal is an artist, author and art critic.

Born in 1997 in Paris where she lives and works, she studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris after completing her studies in literature and a university research on the contemporaneity of art forms since the Renaissance. Her work continues today in a protean plastic creation, combining the production of objects, texts, fictions and images with the practices of performance, the body and language.

Also a critic, she regularly contributes to the daily online newspaper AOC by writing about art, cinema, literature, and more broadly about contemporary creation. She participates in the elaboration of the magazine Décor, dedicated to emerging creation in the fields of design and arts, and co-edits the second opus published in summer 2022, on the question of “Vulgaire”. Her first book Chaplin was published in 2022 in the collection “Icônes” of Editions Les Pérégrines. In 2022 and 2023, she assisted the curator François Piron at the Palais de Tokyo on “Exposé-es” (17/02/23 – 14/05/23), her group exhibition conceived with the art historian and art critic Elisabeth Lebovici, based on her book Ce que le sida m’a fait (JPR, 2017).

His project at Villa Medici: Percocette

From 1999 to 2016, an estimated 453,300 people died from opioid use in the United States. The phenomenon of addiction is spreading, and is now described as a global pandemic. The painkiller, a palliative, appears to be a keystone in the molecular economy of our bodies – as if from one end of society to the other, our bodies lacked a specific substance to live in society. It is together that we must admit it: we are overwhelmed by pain, we do not know how to treat it.

From this painful observation, a writing motive is born: that of identifying the pains of our contemporary liberal societies by collecting them in the streets or in intimate spaces. Rose Vidal’s project is to test, in the long time of a story, the bet of a curative or palliative function of art. She thus proposes to imagine art as a factory of plastic painkillers and to compose its treatments in the infinite workshop of fiction, forging works there as one forges weapons.

The residency at the Villa Medici marks the first stage of this research, where the author will draw from the pictorial energy of Rome the forms of her artistic painkillers, and will go to meet her character-painkiller, craftswoman of the stupefying, mercenary painkiller.

© Vincent Ferrane