Simon Moretti: Scenes from a Divided Subject
featuring Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Joel Wyllie.

“The I is always in the field of the other” - Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964)

‍Scenes from a Divided Subject is an exhibition by Simon Moretti that engages with the writings and theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, drawing in particular on his concept of the three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. For Lacan, these registers describe the fundamental dimensions of human experience. The Imaginary relates to images, identification, and misrecognition, how things appear to us and how we appear to ourselves. The Symbolic refers to the invisible structures that organise meaning: language, social rules, and shared systems of authority. The Real, by contrast, is not simply reality itself but what resists language and representation, something ungraspable that can only be encountered through its traces or disruptions.

At the centre of the installation stands a large plinth on which three distinct objects are arranged in constellation, bringing image, power, and material presence into contact with one another. Rather than following the conventions of a traditional museum display, where objects are separated and assigned fixed meanings, this grouping presents them as a single sculptural work whose significance shifts through proximity and contrast,  a site where connections are simultaneously proposed and unsettled.

The first object is a late Gothic carved wood sculpture depicting the Coronation of the Virgin c. 1500, a subject widely incorporated into Southern German altarpieces of the middle to late Gothic period. It represents the elevation of the earthly mother to her celestial and regal position, endowed with divine status and immortality. Although both scripture and Catholic doctrine are silent on the matter, the scene became one of the most celebrated themes of medieval devotion. The image stages a transformation, earthly body becoming heavenly sovereign, in which the question of recognition, of who confers identity and by whose authority, resonates directly with Lacan's account of the subject constituted through the gaze of the Other.

Beside it rests a queen helmet shell (Cassis madagascariensis), its form at once organic and architectural, a structure grown from within and coiled around an absence at its centre. The shell offers an image of the self as a kind of housing: a surface organised around a void, beautiful and functional, yet concealing nothing but the retreat of the living thing that once inhabited it.

The third object is a North German close helmet for field use, Brunswick c. 1560-70, a crested combat helmet whose elegantly tapered form belies its purpose. Designed to protect and to intimidate in equal measure, the morion is both armour and image, a face that presents nothing but an impenetrable surface to the world, speaking to the Lacanian notion of the mask and the function of the gaze.

Taken together, the three objects trace a loose arc across Lacan's three orders: the Coronation belonging to the Symbolic, a scene of investiture and identity conferred through ritual and language; the shell inhabiting the Imaginary, a mirroring surface that reflects the outline of a self without containing one; the morion touching the Real, mute and impenetrable, resisting interpretation while demanding to be confronted.

These objects are presented alongside Moretti's signature neons, together with two works that extend the exhibition's themes. The first is Grand Air (Les Yeux Fertiles) 1936, a collaborative Surrealist etching by Pablo Picasso and French poet Paul Éluard, taking as its starting point Éluard's poem of the same name. Both were friends of Lacan, and the three figures shared a milieu in which psychoanalytic and Surrealist ideas moved freely between them. The second is a drawing from Joel Wyllie's Shedding Pictures series, works built up over long periods in the sketchbook, revisited across months and sometimes years, with erasure forming a core part of their development. The accumulated marks and removals of these drawings speak directly to Lacanian ideas of memory as never simply a record but a site of continual revision: what is retained, what is lost, and what returns in altered form. Two cursive lowercase i neons flank the installation, their mirrored placement evoking the Lacanian split subject — an "I" that asserts itself yet never fully coincides with its own image or speech.

In the lower ground space, a looping video constructed from inverted archival footage of Lacan's lectures extends these concerns into time and language. With image and audio reversed, speech becomes unreadable while subtitles remain intact, placing the viewer in the gap between sense and opacity. Across sculpture, light, and moving image, the exhibition foregrounds dislocation, fragmentation, and the unstable processes through which subjectivity is formed.

‍Simon Moretti is an artist based in London. His work deals with psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts through context and display, the use of appropriated images, archives, curatorial and publishing projects. Exhibitions include: Hereafter, The Swedenborg Society, London (2025), Eau Sauvage, Mackintosh Lane, London (2022); Crocodile Cradle, PEER, London (2021); None of the Above, a project by John Armleder, Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2020); The Enigma of the Hour, with Goshka Macuga, Freud Museum, London (2019); A Utopian Stage: To Be Free is to Lose Sight of the Shore, curated by Vali Mahlouji, Dhaka Art Summit 18, Bangladesh (2018); Revolt of the Sage, with Craig Burnett, Blain Southern, London (2017); The Camera Exposed, works from the collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2016); and Les Palais des Étoiles, Dadadandy at Selfridges, London (2007).

Special thanks to Mullany Haute Epoque Fine Art and Sims Reed London.
​
​https://www.interval-clerkenwell.art/scenes-from-a-divided-subject