Rose Vidal

Rose Vidal is an artist, author and art critic. Born in Paris in 1997, where she lives and works, she trained at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris after studying literature and doing 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 is a regular contributor to the online daily AOC, writing about art, cinema, literature and, more broadly, contemporary creation. She contributes to the magazine Décor, devoted to emerging creation in the fields of design and the arts, and co-edits the second issue, published in summer 2022, on the question of the “Vulgar”. Her first book, Chaplin , was published in 2022 in the “Icônes” collection by Editions Les Pérégrines. In 2022 and 2023, she assists curator François Piron at the Palais de Tokyo on “Exposé-es” (02/17/23 – 05/14/23), his group show conceived with art historian and critic Elisabeth Lebovici, based on her book Ce que le sida m’a fait (JPR, 2017).

From 1999 to 2016, an estimated 453,300 deaths were caused by opioid use in the United States. The phenomenon of addiction is spreading, and has now been described as a global pandemic. The painkiller, palliative, appears as 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 for living in society. Together, we have to admit it: we’re overwhelmed by pain, we don’t know how to deal with it. This painful observation gave rise to a writing motive: to identify the pains of our contemporary liberal societies by collecting them in the streets or in intimate spaces. Rose Vidal’s project is to test the curative or palliative function of art over the long term, in the form of a narrative. She thus proposes to imagine art as a factory of plastic painkillers, and to compose her treatments in the infinite workshop of fiction, forging works as one forges weapons. The residency at Villa Medici marks the first stage of this research, where the author will draw on the pictorial energy of Rome to create the forms of her artistic painkillers, and meet her character-painkiller, craftswoman of the narcotic, mercenary painkiller.