Mondays Are Fridays

    Presented across the gallery’s two spaces, the inaugural exhibition Mondays Are Fridays by Coco Capitán brings together paintings on canvas and on boat sails, photographs, poems, drawings, sculptures, and publications. Born in Seville in 1992, and having “paradoxically had to work commercially in order to finance [her] fine art studies” in London, where she now lives, Coco Capitán was early on invited to let her personal research permeate her commissioned works, establishing a clear continuity in her practice between experimentation and application. Through intimate references to navigation, childhood, sport, or dreams, Mondays Are Fridays articulates a body of work in which the diversion of signs, humour, melancholy, and a keen sense of aphorism become ways of holding steady.

    At JKG Vaugirard, the exhibition embraces a diversity of techniques that bear witness to an artist showing “increasing complexity and interdependence [in] her practice in recent years” (Simon Baker, 'Coco Capitán: at the other side…', Busy Living, Loose Joints, 2019).
    Bringing together painting, drawing, and the art of the formula, Imagination Investments (2025) mimics the visual communication of financial institutions—here the bank ING and its emblematic lion—and reminds us that we must dream. Or that we must breathe, as in Breathable Air, Inc. (2020), a document drawn like a photographic image.
    Since 2022, the artist has extended her pictorial practice to painting on boat sails. A quasi alter ego, the figure of the “lost sailor” appears in numerous works. Imagine him as a painter, at sea and short of canvas: his sails are his salvation. Coco Capitán reuses worn sails, which she cuts and sews to achieve the desired format and shape. She chooses them first and foremost for the iconographic or textual elements they already display. For several years now, she has devised a personal alphabet combining numbers and letters; thus the number “72” sewn onto a sail appeared to her as “TS,” allowing her to form “72UN4M1 / TSUNAMI.” She likewise writes “SYNESTHESIA” as “5YN357H3514”—numbers are often inverted, such as 3/E or 4/A, a phenomenon commonly associated with dyslexia. We are familiar with numeronyms, where words incorporate numbers for the sounds they produce—“4ver,” “2day”—but in Capitán’s work, the association is not phonetic; it is purely visual. Thus, on the horizon, she can read “L4CRIMO54” and identify The Lacrimosa (2025), a sailboat navigating the ocean of her tears, of which the artist presents a reduced version in the form of a model.
    The dream of a life on the water is the point of departure for the series Naïvy in 50 (Definitive) Photographs (2022), a long-term project imagining a nautical universe populated by these lost sailors. These photographs are an ode to the fragility of freedom and to the nostalgia of youth, and by pairing them with their handwritten titles, Coco Capitán creates a short visual poem each time. The same holds true for the Polaroids, including PTSD (2022), which recalls that in her youth the artist practised synchronized swimming intensively, or Candela’s Blue Dream (2022), dedicated to her younger sister, who dreams as one might imagine the actress Cate Blanchett dreaming (A Catalogue of Skies To Choose From And Dream Of, 2025).
    Coco Capitán thus applies her idiosyncratic handwriting to a multitude of supports, from monumental sails to correspondence cards, from intimate notebooks to hotel notepads. Her texts are often aphorisms, poems disguised as daily notes. To date, this practice has been consecrated by two books, If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes (2019) and Words on Paper (2025).