Opening Thursday, March 12, from 6 pm to 9 pm
Exhibition from March 12 to April 25, 2026
Les filles du calvaire is hosting the first solo exhibition in France of sculptor, ceramicist, and visual artist Julia Haumont. Dans ma robe, couleur du temps focuses on that sensitive moment when childhood shifts—between fears and desires, unspoken thoughts and discoveries.
On the ground floor, sculpture takes center stage. A single figure, feminine and youthful, engages in gymnastics exercises with a certain nonchalance, reflected in relaxed poses or mismatched socks that harmonize in tone. The viewer witnesses, unseen, a stretching or posing session in which multiple moments are captured and brought together in one place, following the artistic practice of doubling bodies and episodes in painting. It evokes the end of a dance class attended only by girls, repeating a final figure while stretching, in the paradoxical intimacy—both collective and caring—that the group offers, just before the first signs of adolescent modesty appear. Other forms—water-themed sculptures in red, blue, or gray—recall the rococo of baroque mirrors, doubling the questions of bodies and their transformations.
Moving upstairs marks a transition both crucial and subtle. It represents the individuation of the body, as a single sculpture appears at first, and, at the edge of Eden, it is unclear whether she is entering or leaving, with a new consciousness: that of nudity, desire, and being looked at. The young girl, melancholic and serene, has just put on a wedding dress, perhaps her mother’s, allowed for her to wear—perhaps to brighten her birthday. But she soon realizes that this extraordinary garment, the attire for the most beautiful day of a life, is torn at the knee. How many questions slip through this fold, how many fears and daydreams… Alone with them, the girl suddenly notices a new character on the wall: a dancing Harlequin, a wild reinterpretation of Andersen’s cut-out papers, whose eyes, painted on a plate-mask, look down at her—a first male presence, though composed of uterine forms, disjointed and distant, comic yet pitiful. In response to this fundamental tear, a large textile composition and several prints on buttercloth evoke, in a more colorful register, the expansion and plurality of identities. Further along, in a dark cabinet, two swaying basins hint at future discoveries. They belong to a girl who perhaps wants to be grown-up but is not yet.
Dans ma robe, couleur du temps traces, through the progression of works, the thread of an adolescence that forms as it slips away—a moment in the relationship to the female body that is built and discovered, through or despite it, with or against the other. The American writer Melissa Febos, in Girlhood, writes: “At thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter parent, I accepted our collaboration as inevitable. I needed it, which only multiplied my hatred.” Between divorce and collaboration, every feeling—from exuberance to malaise—is possible, embodied by the range of positions of the young girls: from solitary, quiet relaxation against a wall to voluptuous stretching on the back, echoing the offered—but lifeless—body of Alexandre Schoenewerk’s La Jeune Tarentine.
Since graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in 2017, Julia Haumont has been sculpting these postures. They represent the same young girl who could resemble her like a sister, if it were not for the unsettling seriality that allows one to move from a singular particular to the plural of a group and its condition. This body, both unique and fragmented, gradually enriches her repertoire and reads as a multiple. In Haumont’s own words, the pronoun “they” is necessary: “They are always about the same height because they do not age, although they balance on this narrow line at the end of childhood.” Only the flesh of the latest sculptures shown here has slightly lost its childlike suppleness, gaining more muscular tension. The story behind their generic faces has no other subject than the collective plurals or singulars used by Monique Wittig: one, they. Moreover, the title of the exhibition, a fragment of a song from Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne, remains open, calling for a subject yet to be defined.
The tale, like these young girls, is generally not fixed in time or space, which ensures its reach. As changeable and iridescent as it is, the robe couleur du temps also recalls magical and narrative invariants. Beyond the pleasure of carnival and period costumes, beyond the cruel enchantment of drama, one must deconstruct it: just as it is undesirable to marry one’s father, marriage should not be imagined as the most beautiful day of a life. The color of time here is less that of the ideal spring in a blue or red kingdom, with clouds passing over a fabric sky, than that of time lost and recovered, only to be demystified. Childhood fades into the first emotions of adolescence, soon diverted by the marital injunction. This is echoed by Anne-Marie Schneider, a draughtswoman who animates her drawings in Super 8 films and shouts in voice-over in Mariage (2003) a falsely innocent nursery rhyme we have all heard: “I want to get married, have children, lots of children!” How many sought princes or princesses when they might have desired the page, the chambermaid, or nothing at all?
In its time, Degas’s Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer caused a scandal precisely because it revealed the sordid reality of the ballet corps during the Belle Époque. Here, it is less a question of male or institutional predation than an invitation to reexamine what conditions us. If innocence must be preserved, it certainly is not by telling ourselves too many stories.
— Xavier Bourgine
