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 Odéon, the exhibition traces the trajectory of Coco Capitán’s work through a succession of projects that, establishing what amounts to a production line, manifest the continuity between personal research and commissioned work.
    In 2023, Coco Capitán announced her own death on the front page of a newspaper read by an incredulous female character (The Present Morning Times: Bath Time Drama—the text is inspired by Mark Rothko’s obituary in The New York Times in 1970). In 2025, this edition of The Present Morning Times took shape as a self-published artist’s book which, while reporting the sad news on its cover, overflows with humour through its wordplay, aphorisms, and whimsical editorials, deploying all the codes of the press, from the crossword puzzle to the expected obituary, not to mention advertisements—here for Capitana, the brand launched in real life by the artist.
    Coco Capitán knows the press well, and it is in this context that she photographed for a US magazine the actress Cate Blanchett reading her Present Morning Times. The black-and-white checkerboard floor emanates from another painting, A School Day Afternoon (2025), in which the artist evokes her childhood in southern Spain, when, in the family home with an identical floor, television and her younger sister’s laughter offered tempting alternatives to serious piano lessons. A small handwritten note reminds us of this.
    At its initial stage, this painting even appears in the background of another photograph featuring Cate Blanchett—a collision between personal practice and commissioned work that is further reinforced by a third photograph in which the actress appears on screen like Alf in the painting. Coco Capitán completed the painting after the session with Cate Blanchett. Displayed in the window are the preparatory sketches for this shoot, the final publication, and the obituaries page of The Present Morning Times.
    In cinema, continuity stills ensure the raccords between scenes in order to maintain the illusion. With Coco Capitán, projects connect through a continuity that sustains a troubling relationship with reality.


— Jean-Kenta Gauthier, January 2026