Nathalie Rey: the summer of snakes

French artist Nathalie Rey (Paris, 1976) arrives at the Arranz-Bravo Foundation in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat with the exhibition L'été des serpents. Despite her extensive artistic career —which includes residencies in Berlin and Istanbul and a prominent presence in the Barcelona gallery scene (Alalimón and Artfutura galleries)— this is her first solo exhibition in l'Hospitalet.

He is accompanied on this adventure by art historian Jordi Garrido (Barcelona, 1991), who, beyond purely curatorial tasks, has accepted the game of becoming —through his words— a kind of alter ego of the artist. Rey's work is fundamentally performative and clearly provocative—you only have to go to his website for him to point a gun at us—, and combines a wide variety of languages and supports that he adapts to his needs. The results become a mixture of innocence and rawness that attack the viewer to confront him, directly and without hesitation, with the environment and with himself. Garrido's proposal for this exhibition has been to present the artist's latest works and, at the same time, go a little further: to ensure that Rey's life experience in relation to artistic practice has a specific weight within the exhibition.

The Planet of the pigs series 2, Nathalie Rey (2022)

And if we talk about life experience, it is essential that some of his great influences emerge in a more or less obvious way. For this reason, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 – 2002) —a great influence on Rey— is breathed into this exhibition. With these premises, a new biography of the artist —closer to creativity than to reality— is explained through a series of installations that have desire as a common thread. This desire has a lot to do with the artist's conception of art, which we could define as a combination of introspection, social criticism and narrative in the search to generate multiple layers of meaning and a complexity that goes beyond activism or explicit denunciation. And the fact is that Rey considers that art should not provide simple or linear answers to major social problems, but should allow multiple readings and interpretations. This desire is reflected in this exhibition, where diverse elements are combined—references to history, literature or politics—to construct narratives that challenge the public's expectations.

Shipwreck I, variation, Nathalie Rey (2019)