Our Red Devils, Our Drifting Upheavals 

A red and black presence emerges like an ectoplasm, a visible emanation that serves both as an introduction and a guide for the entire exhibition. At once provocative, sacred, masked, horned, shrouded in mystery and adorned with mirrors, the figure never fully reveals itself. It originates from the Martinican carnival; the Red Devil roams the streets like a festive spectre. Its annual appearance during Martinique’s Mardi Gras opens a symbolic portal to ancient worlds buried in the folds of history, to hybridised beliefs and exiled tales. Although seemingly local and specific, this figure resonates across other territories such as Haiti, Brazil and countries surrounding the Gulf of Guinea.

Julien Creuzet takes this carnivalesque figure as his point of departure, probing both an archaeology of the masked body and of contemporary myth. His intention is not simply to represent the Red Devil, but to extend its evocative power and potential for transformation.

Elsewhere in his work, Julien Creuzet conjures classical figures from Western mythologies. Here, Saint George, Perseus and Andromeda are not fixed, impenetrable symbols: they become shifting matrices traversed by history and the present. The Red Devil is reinvested with new strength: no longer a chained victim, but a plural, fluid, androgynous, dancing, untamed entity, becoming at once Andromeda, Perseus and Saint George.

This figure, at once master and sacred beast, embodies the oppressed and the powerful alike. Julien Creuzet’s mythological retelling and his visual language are key elements in an equation for emancipation. By questioning the role of foundational narratives in our collective imagination, he proposes unexpected alliances between ancient figures and Afro-Diasporic spiritualities.

When the hero becomes the monster, or when the victim seizes control of their destiny, traditions grow attentive to metamorphosis and open up to syncretism – not as a perverse fusion, but as a zone of creative tension. We’ll use this term with caution though, as it is often used to reduce entire spiritualities to an exoticising blend and to flatten their complexities.

The exhibition space is conceived as a whole, as an artwork in itself – an immersive environment. Within it, the artist has assembled a constellation of fragmented films, wallpapers and sculptures to form a single narrative body – or is it a shattered poem. Singing in both Creole and French, Julien Creuzet’s voice weaves an essential sonic layer, conjuring multiple presences throughout the gallery.

Arms, hands, feet and other fragments emerge across his entire body of work. The body remains central, even when it appears in pieces or as a ghostly presence. These are political bodies, absent-yet-present, carriers of silenced histories; the same bodies we encounter in these works on paper, made from pages torn from anthropology books that have been partially erased.

Materials and motifs recur like visual and ritual leitmotifs. Rice occupies a singular place: present in many of the artist’s works (at the Frac Normandie, Caen, in 2015, or at the Lyon Biennale in 2017), here it is considered a votive, almost sacred material. This grain symbolises at once sustenance, fragility, collective memory and the power of offerings. The trident, meanwhile, is an ambivalent weapon. It evokes Neptune – featured in the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale – as well as the Red Devil and the arquebusier. It stands as an attribute of power, a sign of resistance, of resurgence even.

The artist invites us to take a leap of faith in imagination. The many dimensions of the intimate and the political come together in each of his works. Boundless pantheons emerge to revitalise and enrich the present with poetic force. There may well be a new cosmology taking shape – one capable of stirring unfamiliar emotions.

Our Red Devils, Our Drifting Upheavals opens, unsettles and invents. By reflecting on our contemporary relationship with multiple narratives, the official History, ancient spiritualities and contemporary myths, the exhibition cultivates a productive tension that reignites some of art’s most fundamental purposes.