A CRUMPLED DRAPING

While Sophie Langohr welcomes a television crew in her workshop, the first image the camera captures is that of a table piled with fashion magazines. Given their number, hairdressers and manicurists can be expected; there is plenty of reading material. Yes, the artist is a dedicated reader of “Vogue” and other magazines of this kind. She constantly scans their images. And it seems to me that after her interest in the Virgin, saints and Marian statues, she has now turned her interest to the fate of nymphs, these minor irradiating divinities that possess a genuine power to fascinate. They have appeared throughout history since antiquity: obsolete, resurgent, surviving, draped nymphs, often erotic, sometimes disturbing, Venus and the maidens of the Renaissance, the Christian maenads, baroque martyresses, Charcot’s hysterical nymphs. Following Aby Warburg, who saw the “Ninfa” as an ever-returning female ghost, Georges Didi Huberman turned his attentions to the study of their drapery, their draping, as “a pathetic tool” across the centuries. Even to the point where the dress of the nymph is thrown in a heap, crumpled.   “Drapery” (2013-2014) is the generic title of a recent series of works by Sophie Langohr.

Considering these new photographs, I am reminded of this strange exordium of Leonardo da Vinci. “And make few folds, except for the elder in togas and full of authority.”   The advice issued by one of the masters of the pleat seems remarkable. Let us remember the “Drapery for a seated figure” in the Louvre; it is nothing short of amazing. Using brush, tempera and white heightenings, Leonardo, by means of the draping, reveals a body barely present through the attentive study of what we could call the fall of the folds, the fall and hold of the fabric in the successive pleats, as if the imprint of the movement had remained intact even after its bodily source had disappeared. Vasari himself testifies: “Leonardo made a lot studies from nature, he writes, and he happened to make clay models on which he placed wet cloth, coated with earth, which he then patiently painted on very fine canvases or prepared linen: he thus obtained wonderful effects in black and white from the tip of the brush; we have authentic examples in our portfolio of drawings.”   The advice of Leonardo, who adds, “imitate as much as possible the Greek and Latins in their way of showing limbs when the wind presses the sheets against them” stands out by its singularity. It is the reproduction of the nature of things that interests the artist, the very nature of nature. And this art of suggestion, in which emphasis is created through concealment, is not really a concept that belongs to nature. It is the product of the human hand that weaves.

The contemporary image, arty, sophisticated, constantly mining the storerooms of museum, turning the gaze on what is rare and therefore valuable, has of course realised the potential of desire a pleat might hold. Sophie Langohr has focused her gaze on the hands, those which in advertising images hold a drape ready to be dropped, hands that wrinkle veil, cloth and fabric. These hands caress, reveal, protect, embrace, hold, languish or clench, embodying Eros and the language of the body. Already, this singular framing opens our gaze onto new territories. We no longer perceive the visible in the same way; the commonly visible is disassembled, reconfigured. And this acts as an unveiling, another way of removing the sheet. Sophie Langohr accentuates the uneasiness these images suggest, confusing our gaze. Like Leonardo who put wet cloths on his models of clay, she wrinkles, crumples, folds and drapes the glossy paper, effectuating singular manipulations through which flesh, sheets and pleats on glossy paper become blurred in the way they fall, are held, clenched and embraced. Somewhere in between consummation and consumption, she reclaims the incarnation of the icon and simultaneously rids the image of its disembodied veils and fabrics, its crumpled paper, the rags of the industry of consumption.

Behind the veil that unfolds, we expect a truth to be revealed. When the veil is dropped, will it really have disappeared? Will there be an unveiled truth, a naked thing finally perceived, finally named? In fact, is it not the veil itself that dictates this expectation? “To do away with the veil, writes Jacques Derrida, is the very movement of the veil: it reveals itself, reaffirms itself by retreating, and when it puts an end to itself, it becomes shroud." Sophie Langohr manages to maintain the derangement, the ambiguity and equivocation. The factory of images indeed emanates an irresistible attraction, a persuasive force capable of pulling us in. This is the power of enchantment. (JMB)