Galeria Foco is pleased to present Zangbeto: The Night Hunters, a solo exhibition by Pauline Guerrier. Opening March 19, 6 PM.

The exhibition unveils the results of the artist’s research conducted in Benin in 2024, during her second artistic residency at the Fondation Zinsou. Deeply engaged with Beninese culture and its spiritual traditions, Pauline Guerrier immersed herself in the rituals and figures of Vodoun, focusing in particular on the Zangbeto, guardians of the night, and the Egungun, ancestors who return among the living. These mystical figures, protectors of the community and mediators between the visible and the invisible, inform a plastic and symbolic reflection at the core of her practice. Through installations made of fabrics dyed by the artist, cut, recomposed, and rematerialized, Pauline Guerrier gives rise to vibrant, colorful silhouettes that function as contemporary reinterpretations of these spiritual guardians.

This new body of work continues the trajectory of her international artistic research, notably initiated during her residency in India and presented in Brussels in the exhibition The Guardians. Through her travels from Benin to India, via Latin America and Europe, the artist observes, collects, and absorbs forms, gestures, colors, and rhythms drawn from ancestral ceremonies. From these experiences, she extracts a personal mythology composed of intertwined memories and living traditions, which she translates into a singular visual language.

Combining textile sculpture, installation, straw marquetry, drawing, and ritual presence, the works presented at Galeria Foco extend this exploration of universal protective figures. At the threshold between day and night, reality and imagination, Pauline Guerrier’s Zangbeto emerge as hybrid entities rooted in ancestral Beninese spirituality and reimagined through the artist’s contemporary gesture.

_

Watching Pauline Guerrier at work is disarming. Everything seems simple. Obvious. With each gesture, intuitions appear to confirm themselves effortlessly. 

There are moments in life that feel like thresholds. Moments when what had been moving through hidden folds finally rises to the surface. Pauline Guerrier’s first trip to Benin is one of these. A one-month residency that flourished into nine months of emergence. A movement from the inside out. To step away. Into the unknown, toward the distant. To step away from a family of artists, from herself and her daily life, but also from the studio, a predefined space of creation.

From the very beginning, materials have drawn her in. The young artist challenges the thickness of fresh concrete, the resistance of metal, the flexibility of polyethylene. She explores patterns and colors. Her formal research is striking. Yet in Benin, something opens up. An inner shift. Pauline Guerrier understands that the studio is no longer a fixed place, but a way of being available to the world. There is no use in rushing nature. Contemplation becomes the greatest resource.

The stories and objects gathered turn into a reservoir of textures and forms. To slow down and observe. The artist allows herself the time of nothingness. The time of her desires, of the daily cycle, of heat, of solitude, of nightfall that comes too early and brings with it its share of ghosts. She builds her invisible fortress, one that will never leave her and that she will now carry everywhere. An intimate world nourished by a voracious curiosity for what remains to be discovered: elements, know-how, narratives.

In this stripping down, boredom has no place. The struggle with matter becomes a dance. It is no longer about fighting it, but about understanding it, gently diverting it, listening to its secrets. In Benin, a country of cashews and cotton, Pauline Guerrier dyes percale with hibiscus, ginger, turmeric, and indigo. Whether at the market or in the forest, encounters are decisive for gathering ingredients; one must allow oneself to be guided. To merge with the rhythm. Then comes the moment of engaging with the material, getting to know the textile and its textures, assembling and starting again to find the right palette.

The artist understands that one can do a great deal with what is available. A found object, an unknown material, a ritual. A thread appears between nature, the hand, and the gods. Pauline Guerrier looks at the world as an infinite field of experimentation where everything becomes sensitive. The inanimate infused with a vital force; this is the discovery of animism.

At the heart of this process, drawing remains a primary language. For it is through lines that Pauline Guerrier grasps the world. In her travel notebooks, she records images, places, faces. Drawing has always been a way for her to remember life. Gradually, presences grow denser and move from one medium to another. What was once a notebook becomes an assemblage of sketches from which her works emerge. An alphabet she brings to life. A language for encountering another.

Benin opened the way. The passage from idea to object, now inhabited and shaped by the hand is direct. Without rupture, without demonstration. Pauline Guerrier can do much with little because she never opposes gesture and thought. She follows through on what she begins. Always grounded. And perhaps this is where the precision of her work lies: in this rare fluidity, where everything seems to unfold effortlessly, even as everything is in motion.

Eulalie Juster