full article on Plasma Contemporary
2026
(...) Your art moves between different cultural references from Gothic and Romanesque to contemporary club and rave culture. How do these ostensibly different worlds connect to one another?
I grew up in an environment deeply invested in art and architectural history. My grandparents are historians specialising in Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Normandy. As a child, I repeatedly played with my sister in the hidden parts of monuments such as Mont-Saint-Michel and Saint-Ouen Abbey, for which my grandfather had the keys. So before becoming political or aesthetic references, the Middle Ages and their contemporary reinterpretations had a deeply emotional significance for me. They are also a way of paying tribute to the body of knowledge and heritage in which I grew up.
Then, I became increasingly interested in the cultural functions of these forms. I have always been fascinated by the tension in late medieval imagery between desire and shame, the grotesque and the sublime. This tension can be found throughout Flamboyant Gothic imagery, where grotesque figures coexist with ethereal ones, I am thinking in particular of The Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, as well as depictions of Hell, which Umberto Eco extensively discusses in his History of Beauty. Later on, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, in particular, fuelled some of my earliest visual fantasies. I remember spending hours looking at reproductions of The Garden of Earthly Delights: bodies are devoured, transformed, or brought into states of pleasure, all with a humour that is simultaneously gargantuan and extremely refined.
This is where I find a connection with club and rave culture. Both worlds can oscillate between emptiness and fullness, control and its loss. Both can become spaces in which the body is transformed, transcendented, or temporarily dissolved.
Club culture also contains a productive contradiction between appearance (clothing, aesthetic codes, the performance of the self) and the possibility of genuine bodily liberation. The club can be deeply political and simultaneously profoundly commercial, bringing feminist and queer forms of resistance into contact with the overconsumption and homogenisation of contemporary nightlife.
My experiences with psychedelics in these spaces intensified this connection.
In an environment where we look at ourselves as much as we look at other people’s bodies, such experiences can lead to what is often described as “ego dissolution.” For me, this was particularly revealing: having grown up with a strong sense of surveillance and constant control over my own body, being able to temporarily forget it within a collective and cathartic space was a significant turning point. Psychedelics also changed the way I perceive form: I began to see the world as more fractal and modular, and the self less as an autonomous entity than as part of a larger environment. The individual becomes collective; the boundaries of the body shift.
I regularly collaborate with electronic music producers to give my installations an architectural and immersive dimension. For my solo show Nymphenbrünnen curated by Mathilda Portoghese, I worked with DJ and producer Laze, who also has a background in architecture. Her sound design moved between ethereal, timeless sounds and more physical, immersive textures. The installation could therefore evoke both the ambient music of a rave and almost religious sounds within a cathedral. Perhaps this is where these worlds meet most strongly for me: in their ability to use space, sound, the body, and excess to produce an experience that momentarily transcends the individual.
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interview by Ecem Meric
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Nymphenbrünnen
A text by Mathilda Portoghese
Solo show Adèle Vivet
Nonono Artist Run space
Non Etoile Saint-Ouen
Adèle Vivet draws inspiration from the ornamentation of Christian sacred architecture — capitals, tympanums, keystones, bas-reliefs — to create hybrid forms through ceramics and 3D printing. Nymphenbrünnen imagines a carnal encounter between her sculptures and the Gothic architecture of the Saint-Ouen abbey church in Rouen, a place deeply cherished from her childhood. The exhibition creates a singular space for formal dialogue between the seemingly pious monumentality of the building and the artist’s sensual, voracious mythology, which unfolds before us.
Through the extraction of various monstrous figures from architectural vocabulary — gargoyles, caryatids, sirens, Medusas, and others — Adèle Vivet proposes a reinterpretation through the lens of her own body, establishing an ambiguous relationship that is at once hyper-sensual and self-punitive. Within this personal storytelling, she surrounds herself with a clique of legendary wicked women whose desires are emancipated and unapologetic. Yet her inner monsters appear entirely exposed and far less assured, shaped by visceral concerns: the playfulness of their attitudes expresses a voracity that continually swells with the desire for transgression, followed by the mental flagellation and guilt that pleasure itself seems to generate here.
The Chimerea series, composed of five totemic sculptures, formally combines the technical concept of the caryatid with that of the bas-relief in order to stack micro-narratives upon one another. These hydro-chimeras function as confessional portraits, staging the nuanced facets and shadowy dimensions of a young woman trapped between desire and guilt, profound disappointments and ecstatic joys. Oscillating between the technological precision of 3D printing and the human tactility of ceramics, these Boschian nymphets seem to have boarded the Goa’uld spacecraft of an erotic-parodic spin-off, joyfully evoking the playful aesthetics of hentai pornography and erotic comics.
At the heart of this procession of fountain-women persists an obsession: that of the failing fleshly envelope caught in paradox — a body devoured by Judeo-Christian shame, constrained by social and moral injunctions, yet seized by an insatiable and polysemic appetite. Adèle Vivet’s work gives form to this intimate abyss: her sculptures beautifully exude ugliness, excess, and bodily fluids, through details evoking vomit, vaginal secretions, tears, saliva, and semen. Each figure appears both to revel in and suffer from its own materiality, while confessing — with universally addressed tenderness — the impulses, fractures, and desires that have long been suppressed or erased.
Collaboration with DJ and composer LAZE: an immersive sound piece conceived by invited musician Laze amplifies this troubling and visceral atmosphere, enveloping the space in an organic sonic landscape and materializing the threshold between two eras that Adèle Vivet seeks to open.
Mathilda Portoghese
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The Witch and the Mermaid
A text by Camille Minh Lan Gouin
Duo-show avec Blanche Vivet
La Grande Passerelle - Saint-Malo
2025
They play by the seaside, in the forest, in the mist, the foam, or the smoke. They are inventing a game, writing its rules. Their simultaneous gestures constantly echo each other, rekindling childhood games, their magic, and the fantasies they carry. Enclosed in their bubble, absorbed in the stories they tell each other, they could be mistaken for twins.
But they refuse to be mere doubles of one another; they must differentiate themselves and choose unique roles to each in the initiatory fictions they create. One will be the mermaid, the other the witch—but it could just as easily be the reverse. They are sometimes heads, sometimes tails. Yet gradually, something gives way, pulling them apart; they must separate if they want to keep playing together. The distance grows until one remains outside, while the other retreats indoors. But the game each plays on their own remains the same.
Like fantasy tales, an alternative world unfolds before us—a world defined by endemic flora and fauna, far removed from the rationalization and industrial or urban landscapes we inhabit. These unsettlingly enchanting spaces are populated by creatures that stray from humanity, such as mermaids and witches.
Adèle Vivet ’s work explores a powerful relationship with the corporeal. Silhouettes emerge from sharp, organic forms. These bodies, in motion and contraction, reflect the emotional states experienced by the artist as well as her perception of her own body. Materializing these feelings through archetypal figures allows her to confront and exorcise this vision of herself. These characters act as vessels for the artist’s passions, performing them in her stead, like personas enacting a catharsis. Some pieces even serve as accessories, enabling the artist to activate and embody her characters. These objects thus hold transformative potential, capable of altering both reality and selfperception. The artist sometimes depicts herself among her characters, as in a cameo, notably in Self-Portrait with Mouth Wide Open, where she appears threatening.
Blanche Vivet, on the other hand, approaches painting through the contemplation of her surroundings. Elements drawn from life and nature, such as roots, flowers, organs, or flames, twist and flourish into fractals. Each painting represents a threshold, a transition between worlds, where enchantment can be both wondrous and terrifying. The artist maps out spaces with varying scales, highlighting their mystery and magic. With a certain nostalgia for the ephemeral— like her vanished childhood—she seeks to capture movement, seize memories, and surround herself with landscapes imbued with a mystical aura. Echoing video games, some paintings remain in a state of blur, suggesting territories yet to be explored and quests still to be completed.
Throughout the exhibition, the works of the two sisters intertwine, blend, and overlap.
When humans expect fraternal twins, there are rare cases where the two embryos fuse into one, combining two distinct DNA profiles. Children born from this process, called “chimerism,” carry different DNA depending on the part of their body. The union of two fraternal twins thus creates a chimera. Sometimes, the mermaid and the witch merge into a single twin entity: the Sorène.
Camille Minh Lan Gouin
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Podcast Concrètement Flou
Marcelle Germaine
2024
“Hello, hi everyone
After months and months of radio silence, I’m thrilled to be back in your ears—this time with artist Adèle Vivet.
With a background in design, we dove into a real studio-style chat where we unpacked her journey from designer to artist! We talked about her studies, how she developed and deepened her sculptural work as it transitioned into painting.
We also discussed her life as a full-time artist, her upcoming residency in Saint-Malo, and how she’s been refocusing the personal and intimate aspects of her practice alongside her sister Blanche Vivet.
It’s an episode that goes in all directions—a true reflection of the kinds of conversations that happen in the studio!”
à écouter sur Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/episode/2KZuWCDR0ZLFEIAHRajPqM