The exhibition was announced four times on the windows of the corridor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Clermont-Ferrand. Painted directly on the glass, fragmented differently by the uprights of the glass, the yellow posters and their red font address this title to the street ‘Julie et sa cousine’ (Julie and her cousin). By being displayed on the glass rather than on the wall of the long gallery, each poster is as close as possible to the public space while remaining within the school. From the inside, this positioning also makes it possible to see the back of the posters: a fleshy shape, reminiscent of the upper part of a stylised heart that would be placed upside down here, stands out in red against the bright yellow that caught our eye on the outside. This upside-down heart is probably an ass. Yes, an arse as in ‘arse film’, because ‘Julie et sa cousine’ (Julie and her cousin) is a poster that must have adorned the front of an X-rated cinema in the 1970s.

So what we see on this side is the ass of an image. But Julie isn't just the slight protagonist in a film that was consumed in theatres rather than in front of the computer screen. She is also the subject of a poem written by Clément Rodzielski, which serves here as a cue sheet.

In this short rhyming text, Julie shares the spotlight with Clémentine, who we assume is her cousin. There is also talk of cooking, sextape and sextine, in an atmosphere that is more Rohmerian than Dorceloise. Declaimed aloud, the poem progresses through a series of shifted sounds: paronyms and slight anagrams follow one another in the quasi-rigid structure of a sizain whose metre is dictated by the number of syllables in the title of the exhibition ‘Julie et sa cousine’ (Julie and her cousin). It is a sextine. This progression of clever changes within a standard framework reflects the rest of the exhibition.

In the entrance hall of the school, which also serves as an exhibition space, in addition to the original poster of the pornographic film, which is curved on its reverse side, we find 9 aluminium plates (five on the floor, four on the walls) and a wrapped mattress. Each metre-wide metal support is the subject of a different stripping. Some retain their protective film, on which the artist has traced a drawing that looks like the outline of a route that has been crossed out. Others are half bare: Clément Rodzielski has cut along the diagonal of the rectangle and removed half the plastic film that protects the plate from scratches. When this was used as a support for another of these drawn paths, only half of it remained. And when it was blank, he replaced the missing part with a photograph taken on adhesive of the same size (this thin film sometimes covers the protective film, the thickness of which then shows through in a slight relief on the surface of the photographs). These quasi-abstract images are anamorphoses that the artist produced by photographing the reflections produced on the curved surface of a metal dustbin. Only once is the thin plastic film completely removed. But the honour is safe: the metal surface, far from being exposed to our gaze, is covered in white spray paint.

The nudity of the metal, constantly deferred, is the erotic mechanism of the exhibition. It also underlines the importance the artist attaches to the protective film that covers each plate. Of course, the play of inversion that it undergoes permutes the value relationships established between the support and what protects it. The packaging of the mattress, spray-painted with stencils, is another example of this inversion. But in a more literary sense, of which the poem could be a clue, the film motif refers as much to a thin layer of material as to film (and the reflection of the camera lens that appears in the anamorphoses underlines this hypothesis). You know what film is? That thin sheet of celluloid used as a support for the sensitive layer... The place where images were recorded in the time of Julie and her cousin.