Mourning Class

Noémie Bablet

Mourning Class

Sept 6-28 2025

In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyzes the specter of the working class that haunts her as a “contradiction”(1) a double, “now hidden behind a palimpsest of tropes the middle class invented.”(2) Assimilation may be full of promise, but it also carries with it the threat of annihilation. An interpolation to the point of erasure. What Cruz calls the melancholia of class boils down to the feeling of never quite fitting in, a constant inadequacy where the injunction to succeed turns one’s own impossibility against oneself.

The surface of Noémie Bablet’s paintings is impeccable, yet the more we talk about class—about where we stand—the more I wonder if her work don’t stand precisely in this impossible adjustment. In her paintings, she frames forms that could be described as “cute”, “harmless”, “childish”: motifs of flowers, bubbles, screens and dots, which organize themselves, repeating themselves from one surface to another. But behind them, a tear insists (Cosmetic Competence, 2025; Cosmetic Compliance, 2025; Ambiguous Abilities, 2025; Cute but coded, 2025). These motifs exert an attraction on the artist, and run through her practice, reassuring; they respond to a program of contained forms, whose relationships modulate, intentionally luminous, cute, and maintained in a strategic playfulness. The seriality, close to pop art, shifts subtly, not relying on the industrialization of forms and colors, but on a chosen technicity of the means of production of this repetition. The motifs overlap, with varying degrees of transparency, covering, concealing, masking—and acting as one plan screen. The thick wooden panels that literally occupy the space accentuate the gap between the two materialities: the artificial flatness of the eye-catching drawing, and the intrinsic patterns of the wood, its veined, sensory texture, softening the frontality. The colors saturate the motifs with affect, filling them and embodying them, seeming to blush in this suppleness, and whose cosmetic palette exalts their coquettishness, to the point of smoothing them into a direct image.

These works demand contact, but their address falters. The seductive effect is seamless, neutralizing the paintings’ disruptive potential, and this is what becomes disturbing in their presence: pleasing and masking—putting at a distance. Cynthia Cruz describes social class as a kind of “surplus between us”(3) including the “invisible and unseen facets of capital.”(4) An aesthetic, essentially, of codes to master. It seems to me that Noémie Bablet’s paintings sparkle in this zone, in this “surplus”, opening breaches in systems of visual authority, without being vindictive (Devotional maintenance, 2025; Hardorable, 2025). What appears light camouflages, what is most visible conceals. And this is reflected in the choice of motifs—their simplicity, their framing—and their deliberately charming form, whose precise formal elaboration contrasts with the feigned lightness. Perhaps a way of covering up the social codes of embarrassment. In the series Les Héritières, 2025, two-tone striped rings, filled in with colored pencil, form patterns that paradoxically unique. This is more a relationship to her own production, setting it in a temporal dimension where the repetitive gestures of drawing belong to this irreducible time. Here too, the surface seduces, the chosen aesthetic, fully aware of its attraction, emphasizing the emotional relationship between us and the image.

The amplification stretches the motifs towards an optimistic, malleable image; visual effectiveness as a process. But this joyful appearance is accompanied by another charge, and inevitably brings us back to the seductions and alienations specific to liberalism: what it produces, what it induces; as if painting, here, constantly reminds us of the difficulty of situating ourselves, between adherence and distance. Adapting to the expected form, not disturbing, slipping into a representation of control and performance.

September 2025