Wandering through the city, the contours of objects, the spirals of language and sometimes those of obsession, the works of Jonathan Martin, Rosa Moreno and Clémence de La Tour du Pin negotiate with what conditions perception.
Each of them detects and diverts the stratagems that orient the gaze, channel desire and lives – in order to break or disrupt the automaton. "Over the top, undercover" plugs into these tensions within the sensory field, its manipulations, its elastic quality. The exhibition reveals in all things the logic of make-up, where what is enhanced also depends on what one seeks to blur. The artists thus look at what these stagings camouflage, what they express in code – the mechanisms of the unconscious, of debt, of delirium. Of Jonathan Martin's work, one might say that it operates through disruptions, contrary excitations, halfway between euphoria and stasis. The icy vocabulary of media, communication, the music industry or entertainment is by turns intensified or interrupted. Through films, sound pieces, and editions, Jonathan Martin restructures the viewpoint in a complicit relationship with objects, an implosive relationship with language. Everything there is a bit electric, sometimes edging: after or on the brink of climax. Movements of extension and limit also run through the works of Clémence de La Tour du Pin. Through anamorphoses and stratifications, the artist composes assemblages where matter condenses, sometimes fractures; where elements accumulate into textures, tear into patterns, and communicate as if through magnetic affections. Clémence de La Tour du Pin works, among other things, with specific historical archives that serve as anchor points for various inquiries: images of subatomic particles or industrial oil complexes, which she sometimes brings into dialogue with personal photographs, fragments of video clips or pop icons – so many entry points for grasping how perception is constituted as a field of forces. The way power represents itself, the way domination is structured and sometimes even geometrized, also forms one of the matrices of Rosa Moreno's work. Through orbital trajectories, plays of optical distortion and collage, the artist crafts glam and DIY (do-it-yourself) worlds, both cosmetic and robotic, which expose their own mechanisms and imagine their own revolutions. Urbanity, identity, relationships and language are grasped there as technologies; all things that organize experience, that become automated and glitch, suggesting other parts – latent, ideal – to existence. "Over the top, undercover" has something of espionage about it, inspecting what is brewing beyond or beneath surfaces – in particles of air, the lining of clothes, inside handbags. There one finds suspicious, sometimes dilated visions; rotating poems, trompe-l'œil as subtext. Some works operate by frequencies, scanning the space through sound, creating interference fields from one end of the venue to the other – an overheating white cube, where lipstick mingles with asphalt, with grey matter. The exhibition moves from horizon lines to backdoors, toward what structures our relationship to fantasy, control, and interference. It thus drifts toward the undetectable: operations of seduction and transfer, of infestation and short-circuit.
Source: paris.fr — photo: ADAGP, Paris, 2026. Rosa Moreno, Revelations, 2026, 303 x 152 x 202 cm, wood, plywood, mannequin assembled with recovered elements, motor, LED bulbs, found objects. Production: Crac Alsace. Courtesy of the artist and Crac Alsace. © ADAGP, Paris, 2026. View of the exhibition "over the top, undercover" at the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2026. © Photo: Raphaël Massart Courtesy of the Fondation