Monsters (2017 – 2020)

Nathalie Rey has worked during many years with stuffed animals. These seemingly innocent, mass-produced objects have become the raw material of a practice that reflects on the contradictions of contemporary society — its violence disguised as sweetness, its nostalgia intertwined with consumerism, its longing for comfort coupled with existential anxiety.

The series Monsters bring together sculptures, drawings, or actions that explore how fear, tenderness, and play coexist within the same forms. Rey’s “monsters” are both gentle and disturbing; they serve as vessels for unease, tools for catharsis, and symbols of resistance against dehumanization.

Inspired by the Japanese kaiju — creatures born from the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — these works translate today’s hidden threats into tactile, colorful, and ambiguous shapes. Like the kaiju, they conjure fear through fantasy, turning it into something visible, tangible, and almost affectionate.

There is also a deliberate irony in Rey’s choice of materials. While she reclaims a slow, handmade process that resists industrial logic, she does so using the very remnants of that same system — the plush toys that embody mass production and emotional projection. By deconstructing and reassembling them, she seeks to introduce small disruptions into the machinery of desire and consumption.

Ultimately, Monsters is about reconciliation: with the creatures of childhood and the ghosts of adulthood, with what frightens and what fascinates us. It is an attempt to befriend the monsters — eternal, playful, and wounded — that continue to inhabit both our collective imagination and our private lives.