Camille Henrot turns Monday’s chaos into a comprehensive art exhibition featuring a series of new works on display at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome.

Being the first day of the week in most cultures, Monday inspires both positive and negative emotions. The French artist draws inspiration from the bittersweet mix of melancholy and expectations associated with the “moon day” in the popular culture. Henrot meditates on the creative potential of feeling blue, which pushes individuals to find alternative ways of seeing and being in the world. Her series of frescoes, painted on the walls of the 16th century Palazzo Ruspoli, which houses the foundation, explores the various mental states one experiences at the beginning of the week, from uneasiness and instability to excitement at the possibility of change and renewal. Large bronze sculptures depicts allegorical creatures, mostly domestic animals that embody human’s eternal need of affection. The animals also refer to transformation and daily life, therefore to cyclic actions often dictated by artificial systems and social constructions that we use to organize our existence. Hybrid like the nature of Mondays, the pieces on show are open to multiple interpretations, and suggest a certain feeling of distabilizing balance infused with a playful yet serious attitude that recurrs in all Camille Henrot‘s work. The frescos integrate found documents, papers, and small objects all relating to the artist’s own creative inspirations, which oscillate between the mundane and the extraordinary. The exhibition is the first chapter of a larger project that will include the remaining days of the week and will be presented on the occasion of the artist’s Carte Blanche at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in October 2017, an exhibition taking over the whole institution curated by Daria de Beauvais.