SALOMÉ BOTELLA & MARION CHAILLOU : RODÉO!

The Galerie du Jour presents Rodéo!, a two-person exhibition featuring artists Salomé Botella and Marion Chaillou, both winners of the agnès b. Prize and Scholarship awarded to students at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

A leading figure in the promotion of emerging talent, agnès b. has chaired the Association des Amis des Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2007, before establishing the agnès b. Prize in 2008, which is awarded annually to a student at the School. This exhibition thus highlights two artists who have benefited from this support initiative, both of whom were recognised in 2025: Salomé Botella, winner of the agnès b. Prize, and Marion Chaillou, winner of the Friends of the Beaux-Arts Scholarship.

The title Rodeo! stems from the daily proximity of the two artists, who share a studio at Le Houloc, fostering echoes and resonances within their respective imaginations. The rodeo, understood here in its performative and spectacular dimension, becomes a framework for interpreting the exhibition: a staged space where power dynamics, domination, but also resistance are re-enacted. Whilst their practices differ in form and reference, Salomé Botella and Marion Chaillou share an interest in figures drawn from the collective imagination, whose narratives and gestures they re-enact by shaping raw materials. They reinterpret forms laden with meaning, ranging from the skirt to the horseshoe, by shifting their uses, questioning the systems of representation that structure them, and revealing the social determinisms that underpin them.

In her work, Salomé Botella draws on a rural and vernacular imagination. Her sculptures and installations make use of materials from the world of craftsmanship, embodying both the effort of the gesture and that of a material being put to the test. Using simple motifs—branches, arrows and feathers—she creates situations in which objects appear caught up in uneven dynamics, at times clumsy or comical, evoking the narrative logic of early cartoons or certain Hollywood Westerns.

For her part, Marion Chaillou’s work is rooted in an intimate space where her wooden sculptures subvert traditional forms to reveal the power structures and gendered dynamics underlying them. Inside, the artist conceals paintings, miniature gouache images, selected from photographs she has taken or received. By drawing on a highly codified sartorial vocabulary, she questions the construction of identities and roles and unleashes a form of symbolic domestication that is both critical and performative.

Straddling the line between intimate space and rural imagination, Rodéo! creates a common ground where the works engage with one another through a play of postures and tensions. Through this dialogue, the exhibition demonstrates how familiar forms, steeped in customs and narratives, can be reimagined to shift their meanings. Furniture, clothing, tools and objects become vectors of social and symbolic interactions, reconstructing a sensitive cartography of power relations and gender constructions, within an unstable space where personal memory and collective legacies intertwine.