“I CAN SEE YOU & DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY” CLEMINTINE BALL & MATTHEW DUTTON
This season, Corey Helford Gallery presents a compelling two-artist exhibition in Gallery 3 featuring French visual artist Clémentine Bal and multidisciplinary artist Matthew Dutton.
Opening February 21 and running through March 28, the exhibition pairs Bal’s sculptural series I Can See You with Dutton’s thought-provoking body of work Domestic Tranquility. Together, the artists explore the subtle psychological forces that shape how we perceive presence, power, and control within everyday environments.
Presented within the gallery’s dynamic Downtown Los Angeles space, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the tension between observation and performance, perception and conditioning, comfort and autonomy.
Clémentine Bal — I Can See You
4
French artist Clémentine Bal has developed a distinctive visual language that blends pop surrealism, sacred imagery, folk art, and animation influences into a quietly haunting sculptural practice.
Her exhibition I Can See You centers on the elusive feeling of presence—the subtle awareness that something exists just beyond the visible. Bal describes the series as emerging from the sensation of an unseen entity inhabiting everyday spaces.
Rather than depicting characters, the artist creates faces that function as presences, forms that appear to observe viewers as much as they are observed. Suspended between childhood innocence and adult awareness, these sculptures inhabit an ambiguous psychological territory where imagination, memory, and perception converge.
Bal frequently incorporates domestic elements such as curtains, windows, and thresholds, transforming the familiar architecture of the home into a metaphorical landscape of concealment and revelation. Soft drapery and sheer fabrics filter light and volume, creating sculptural forms that feel both delicate and enigmatic.
Drawing inspiration from sacred icons and their timeless gaze, Bal’s feminine faces create a silent dialogue with viewers. In this moment of exchange, the boundaries between interior and exterior—between observer and observed—begin to dissolve.
As Bal explains, the work captures the moment when presence becomes perceptible:
“I Can See You captures the suspended moment when we are unsure whether something approaches us or waits to be recognized.”
Through this subtle tension, the exhibition invites viewers to reconnect with intuition and emotional sensitivity—qualities often overlooked in the noise of contemporary life.
Matthew Dutton — Domestic Tranquility
While Bal explores perception and presence, Matthew Dutton’s Domestic Tranquility examines the politics of comfort, spectacle, and social control.
The series draws conceptual inspiration from the Roman poet Juvenal’s famous warning: “Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt.” In Dutton’s interpretation, the phrase reads less as ancient satire and more as a blueprint for contemporary systems of influence.
Through visually striking mixed-media works featuring ferocious animals transformed into circus performers, Dutton constructs a symbolic arena where power operates not through visible force, but through distraction and normalization.
Tigers dressed in carnival blue, reptiles adorned with theatrical ruffles, and solemn pink elephants carrying nonsensical clowns embody the uneasy balance between instinct and performance, danger and obedience. Their wildness remains visible, yet it is carefully framed as entertainment.
Rendered in layered materials—including ink, watercolor, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and plaster on hand-cut wood—the works possess both visual richness and conceptual weight.
Key works in the exhibition include:
Pernicious Passivity (30” × 34”)
Bernays Gaze (19” × 14”)
Let Yourself Lose Yourself (22” × 32”)
Across the series, Dutton explores the philosophical tension embedded within the modern social contract. Drawing on ideas from thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Foucault, Huxley, and Arendt, the artist questions whether the stability we experience in contemporary society is freely chosen—or subtly engineered.
In this symbolic circus, discipline is replaced by spectacle. Reward and ritual replace coercion. Control operates quietly beneath the façade of comfort.
The audience sees harmony. The performers understand the cost.
Ultimately, Domestic Tranquility asks viewers to consider the psychological tradeoffs embedded in modern life: the exchange of autonomy, attention, and critical thought for curated comfort and endless distraction.
As Mark Twain famously observed, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Dutton’s works encourage audiences to look closer—beyond the costumes, choreography, and smiling masks—to recognize the mechanisms quietly shaping our sense of tranquility.
A Thought-Provoking Dialogue in Los Angeles
Together, I Can See You and Domestic Tranquility create a compelling dialogue about perception, power, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
Bal’s sculptures investigate the psychological presence embedded within intimate spaces, while Dutton’s works confront the broader societal structures that influence how individuals perceive freedom and comfort.
The exhibitions opened February 21 from 7:00–11:00 pm and remain on view through March 28. Admission is free to the public.
Visitors to Corey Helford Gallery can also experience additional concurrent exhibitions, including Adrian Cox’s The Well of Dreams in the Main Gallery and Irish painter Chloe Early’s FUTURES in Gallery 2.
With its layered themes and visually striking works, the Gallery 3 presentation stands as one of the season’s most thought-provoking exhibitions—an invitation to look beyond surfaces and consider the subtle forces shaping how we see, perform, and exist within the world.