Our lives unfold in their shadow.

Our wishes rest in the rustle of their feathers, our prayers hide among the beads of their shells, our hopes grow from the leaves of their hands. The guardians of the world are our protectors. Keepers of water, harvest, and fertility, they bring abundance, joy, and peace. From east to west, north to south, they watch over us.

No one can tell which came first – humans or their gods. Each shapes the other. Pinned to our linings, tucked into our wallets, hanging from our mirrors, the eternal ones sway to our rhythm. On blessed days, we honor them. We speak in their tongues and dress in their finery to call upon their grace. For centuries they have been fervently celebrated, coming alive with the changing of the seasons, to the beat of drums, through bodies in motion.

Pauline Guerrier travels the world, tracing ancestral rituals that celebrate these gods, across the blue planet and through unseen landscapes. In Chile, Uruguay, Benin, Central Europe, and India, she attends ceremonies, absorbing the gestures and songs that honor the Earth and its oceans. The artist observes and collects forms, colors, and sensations. She studies bodies adorned with horns, hides, and fur, and builds a new mythology from her notes – a living material she translates into her own visual language. In turn, she imagines the giants of the outer world as collages of memories and traditions – universal figures that heal and protect. New silhouettes emerge from the pages of her sketchbooks.

During her residency at Villa Swagatam in northeastern India, Pauline Guerrier recreated these figures on linen panels and entrusted them to the patient hands of the embroiderers at the Kalhath Institute in Lucknow. There, they brought them to life. Bead by bead, scale by scale. A colossal work that took thousands of hours to complete.

This exhibition marks the first chapter in a series: nine panels, like nine months of gestation, giving form to these benevolent deities. At the threshold between worlds, Pauline Guerrier’s Guardians of the World move between the real and the imagined. Like a thread drawn by a needle through the canvas, tattooing its reverse side, they bind the two realms – our day and their night, our night and their day. Their wings shift the clouds and brush the mountaintops, their claws filter the air and sunlight, their hooves till the earth, their beaks feed both people and forests.

Their colors beat in rhythm with our hearts, and our footsteps echo in their wake.

(Text by Eulalie Juster)