Galerie Gratadou: a (metro) ticket for Valentine’s Day

Concrete Gold cards, pendant metro tickets (also in concrete), miniature Eiffel Towers, “rough-cut” wristwatches… For Valentine’s Day, gallery owner Christophe Gratadou continues to cast his amused gaze over offbeat, inventive, crazy contemporary artists.

Following a now well-established tradition, he has entrusted an artist, every February 14 for the past 5 years, with creating one or more pieces of jewelry to offer for lovers' celebrations. The curator's specifications can be summed up in two words: surprise me!

With Emmanuel Mousset, the bet paid off. This discreet visual artist likes to divert everyday objects to create surprising counterfeits which, in a brutalist way, move as much as they amuse.

Metro ticket brooch – Emmanuel Mousset – Galerie Gratadou

“Metro tickets are the perfect icons of the city of love! “, says the artist, who adds: “In the age of dematerialization, they “are condemned to disappear”. Except his own which, made of reinforced concrete and like diamonds, are eternal.

We are tempted to say that his short series of miniature works, shaped in concrete, painted and mounted as pendants or brooches, is both "chic and shocking", to quote a TV ad which, in the 1980s, spoke in these terms of the Paris metro.

In any case, for Valentine's Day 2021 at the Gratadou Gallery, Emmanuel Mousset is a worthy successor to Guillaume Aubry ("I kiss you", 2020), Christophe Goutal ("Love at first sight", 2019), Elvire Bonduelle (“To make it pretty”, 2018) and Keren Benbenisty (“Over”, in 2017).

Metro ticket brooch – Emmanuel Mousset – Galerie Gratadou

Text: Katia Barillot

05.02.21