Ninetto is excited to present EDEN CHAOS, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Lucile Littot. The Paris-born, Athens-based artist unveils new works on silk, ceramics, and paper—hyper-feminine, baroque, and provocative—staging mythic visions where grief, desire, and beauty entwine.

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What happens when you kill a sacred cow and wear its coat as a cape? Who is Marylin Minotaure, fragmented idol, fragile sphinx? EDEN CHAOS declines clean answers but piece by piece constructs the kind of world we find ourselves in when life’s dismembering banalities are shrouded and revived by the perpetual medicine of myth. No matter how broken, how much is lost, the archetypes are there for us, dreams and signs always flowing so we can recompose – like Marylin Monroe, like Medea, like Aphrodite and Amanda Lear, all channels and icons who showed up ready to transform their image yet again in order to bless this show. What is this dishevelled paradise in the fragmented penthouse suite of an ex-esoteric emporium overlooking the flowering Fields of Mars? We are in Greece!

The city of Athens where projections of antiquity echo round each corner and the fantasy of escape dies every day in the eyes of a fallen angel looking up at you from the street. Are we high on hedonism or lost in nihilism? The two meet and guardians usher you across, they wait at the peak, doves watching over, dismembered dolls hanging out for you in heaven. A pretty, decapitated face winks at us and blows us a kiss. A giant chrysalis obscures an ornately grilled window. Breasts burst out, a hand reaches for the sky. Love still exists, the one and only true blue drug. Love comes round again, after death, after falling, after horror, after hell. The sequoia tree in the garden. The owl on the road. Keepers of our sanity, our muses, salves and sages always found back in the intimate realm.

For this show multimedia artist, painter, ceramicist, performer and lyricist Lucile Littot creates the latest of her signature hybrid installations throughout the gallery, inviting the body and imagination to fly with her into her choreographed maximalism. Focusing on ceramic compositions and large-scale works on silk for EDEN CHAOS, she reconfigures her longstanding references into reformed visions that speak to the specific time in her life after her grandfather passed with its ensuing mourning of masculine stability and grounding roots. Her personal experiences commingled and enmeshed with a wider culture that’s increasingly divorced from home and sanity and integrity and trust.

Mining her origins in Paris, Provence, and the way French culture shaped her, Littot’s work quotes the architectural aesthetics of Rococo and Baroque, merged with the warped reconstitutions of Surrealist painting and the smooth facade of Postmodern synth pop – in a high camp mode so excessive that it engulfs the eternalism of her subjects in hyper-femme ribbons and antique taffeta cascades. While stylised in this historically informed way, Littot’s installations and their elements are not ironic, they rather arrive with their personal emotionality and universal experiences and cultural cornerstones best dressed in bustiered ballgowns.

Across all her different media, the artist’s subjects are often feminist and sometimes provocative. In this show Littot’s recurring heroine isn’t in haunted chateaux or on the streets of Montmartre. This time we meet her in nature – she is still wild, but she’s a healer, her electrified nipples entangled with supernatural creatures and psychedelic stormclouds. There are dragons and horses, butterflies and swans. Lace gloves meet feather wings. Stockings go up in a bouquet of flames. She has coffee under a tree, vines creep up over her iPhone.

The artist’s work is usually influenced by the energy of the sun, but this newest series was shaped by the more nuanced illuminations of the moon. While working on EDEN CHAOS Littot was reading Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, musing repeatedly on the quote: “La Mort n’est pas définitive, elle est toujours suivie d’une nouvelle naissance. La Lune valorise religieusement le devenir cosmique, et réconcilie l’homme avec la mort. Le soleil, par contre, révèle un autre mode d’existence : il ne participe pas au devenir, toujours en mouvement, il reste inchangeable, sa forme est toujours la même.” She works automatically, with no sketches, drafts or tests. “Fires are burning everywhere and fascism is closing in,” she says, tying a silk bow onto a gold ceramic shoe. “Talismans feel like the only refuge now. Mythology and beauty are all we have.”

—written by Kasia Maciejowska