La série de dessins que Valérie Sonnier a choisi d’intituler Faire le photographe est au cœur de cet indémêlable entrelacs qui unit le burlesque à l’inquiétante étrangeté : ils mettent en scène Skeleton, une marionnette à fils fabriquée au début des années cinquante en Angleterre par la firme Pelham — un squelette en effet, articulé, mais dont le faciès effrayant se tempère bel et bien d’un sourire — et une poupée de carton bouilli défraîchie (elle est sans doute plus ancienne), au regard doux, un peu absent. Ils sont dessinés dans à peu près toutes les positions décrites par le Kama Sutra. Le titre Faire le photographe renvoie directement à l’une d’entre elles, qu’on identifiera sans trop de peine : autrefois, les artisans qui utilisaient des chambres noires et devaient faire leur mise au point directement sur la plaque, s’abritaient de la lumière, pendant la prise de vue, sous un vaste jupon noir fixé à l’arrière de l’appareil ; on imagine le parti que le langage populaire pouvait tirer de la situation, et on trouve encore l’expression humoristique « faire le photographe », avec le sens tout particulier retenu par Valérie Sonnier, dans les notes de Marcel Duchamp ( Elle a de l’haleine en dessous – on dit aussi : faire le photographe). Il y a celui qui fait le photographe et celle qui a de l’haleine en dessous). Skeleton fait le photographe avec la poupée, qui jouerait, de son côté, en retour plutôt les soldats du feu, et pire encore dans la liste des outrages aux bonnes mœurs… On ne saurait imaginer situation plus étrangement inquiétante. (…)
Archives de catégorie : L’actualité à la galerie
Art on Paper Brussels, preview, Sandrine Morgante
D’une part, la claque de quelques slogans nous enjoignant à pratiquer la performance, la prouesse, la mobilisation totale des ressources individuelles et collectives, cette optimisation qui ne peut que nous amener à la réussite, au succès, au confort et à la richesse. Make it possible, Just do it, Think big, Get rich, do more, High Speed, The beginning of a New Aventure. D’autre part, une série d’entretiens, de conversations, que l’artiste a menés avec des hommes et des femmes souffrant de ce que l’on appelle communément le burnout. Sandrine Morgante investit le champ du syndrome d’épuisement professionnel, désigné par cet anglicisme [ˈbɝnaʊt], un syndrome qui combine une fatigue profonde, un désinvestissement de l’activité professionnelle, un sentiment d’échec et d’incompétence dans le travail, résultat d’un stress professionnel chronique : l’individu, ne parvenant pas à faire face aux exigences adaptatives de son environnement professionnel, voit son énergie, sa motivation et son estime de soi décliner. Dans cette nouvelle série de dessins, intitulée You Gold, Sandrine Morgante dessine littéralement le burnout, reprenant injonctions et confidences, slogans et récits de souffrances. Je suis tétanisée, j’arrive plus à bosser, toutes ces injonctions contradictoires qui vous tombent dessus, j’ai complètement péter les plomb, plus c’est dysfonctionnel et plus vous êtes embarquée dans cette espèce de folie, J’aimerais démissionner, j’en peux plus, j’étouffe, c’est moi qui n’ait pas réussi à gérer la pression… Graphiques performatifs, bulles, trous noirs, majuscules, polices tantôt dynamiques et séductives, tantôt hachées et désordonnées, cris ou murmures, la composition de ces dessins au format d’affiche traduit le choc des mots, la perte de soi, les déflagrations systémiques et toutes ces histoires individuelles.
Les dessins ici présentés font tous partie d’une seconde série conçue par l’artiste en 2024
Art on paper, preview, Emilio Lopez-Menchero
Le dessin, dans l’œuvre d’Emilio Lopez-Menchero, accompagne fort souvent les performances et installations de l’artiste. Souvent préparatoire, parfois effet d’annonce, toujours souvenir ou déclinaison. Ainsi ce grand dessin composé sur une série de papiers raisin, friche urbaine aux pneus et poteaux électriques, rappelle l’installation Barricades, réalisée en 2017 à Louvain-la-Neuve dans le cadre de la biennale Oh les beaux jours. Emilio Lopez-Menchero écrivait alors : L’action urbaine que je propose est composée en quatre mouvements : une criée, une récolte, une construction, une destruction. Je sillonnerai les rues du campus en incarnant un « T’chanchès » réactualisé, poussant une charrette à bras, mégaphone à la main, vociférant un appel à la population : « Barricade! Barricade! Lâchez vot’ brol, meubles, bois, métaux, cartons, plastiques et autres encombrants en tous genres…Construisons une barricade ! » Mon intention sera de tirer un trait, une limite, une frontière qui divisera une rue obligeant ainsi les passants à oblitérer leur chemin. Son échelle sera dérisoire à l’ère de l’anthropocène, mais elle marquera de manière infime un temps d’arrêt dans le flux de l’évacuation des déchets. Ceux-là mêmes qui nous préoccupent lorsqu’on en vient à réfléchir à notre empreinte carbone. Ce recyclage servira donc à construire un bastion pour résister. Mais résister à quoi ? Résister comment ? Résister pourquoi ? Et surtout résister à cet endroit-là : l’université. Résistance de pacotille certes, cette muraille terminera son périple dans la décharge municipale.
Le dessin est aussi carnet de voyage. Sur l’île de Gorée en 2022 par exemple, dans la baie de Dakar. cette « île mémoire » est pour la conscience universelle le symbole de la traite négrière. En Cisjordanie également, en l’occurrence à Kufr Ni’ ma, au nord-ouest de Ramallah : Emilio Lopez-Menchero dessine les lignes de ces paysages en terrasses, une géographie humaine, agricole et familiale.
Craigie Horsfield, les images (7)
Craigie Horsfield, les images (6)
EL HIERRO Towards evening a fierce wind comes up over the land from the sea, over the stunted low forest and the scrub, so that everything that grows is bent down, contorted, and knotted in hard dry strands. The island of El Hierro is formed by an extinct volcano, the northern half of which has disappeared into the sea leaving only its southern slopes and the remaining crescent of the crater. Made up of basalt rock and volcanic ash, it rises steeply from sea cliffs to the spine of the crater’s edge, opening out to a narrow sloping plateau towards each end of the ridge. The upper slopes are forested and fre9uently shrouded in clouds. But it rarely rains. For centuries before its colonisation the island was believed to be at the edge of the world. The people who were later to cling to its rock, were driven by extreme poverty and were, in the struggle to survive desperate hardship, often at the edge of abandoning this hard place for the fearful promise of other yet more distant and unknown lands. Low walls, often now in disrepair, divide the greater part of El Hierro. These walls of cinder dissect and grow out of the island’s surface. Arranged in patterns, sometimes clear and sometimes in dense convolutions, they are the monument of possession and division; each sector graduated and determined by what grew in it. Over generations a fig tree would take root, grow, bear fruit, and shrivel, leaving a small circle of stones within another, within a s9uare of rocks carefully arranged. So that in places the land is measured and possessed, in esoteric signs and magical enclosures, as though in a kind of delirium. Elsewhere, as the disorder of rocks gives way to serried lines of petrified lava spewed out of the volcano and channeled down its flanks, the walls criss-cross the flows and the whim of chaos is hardly distinguishable from the calculation of division and limit. This labour, the building of the walls, the enormous burden of generations, now appears abandoned as though a mythical people had passed, and yet families lived or died within its consequence, in the distribution of land and the sparse production they had from it, as they survived another year or were overcome. (Craigie Horsfield)
Craigie Horsfield, les images (5)
BAY OF NAPLES The smoke from the boat burning in the Bay of Naples shrouded the rocks along the sea wall, the road behind it and the crowds that had gathered to watch the fireworks at the end of the festivities and the precession that had wound its way down through Chiaia to the sea in the September of that year. The great plumes of smoke and the last illumination of the fireworks were engulfed by dense clouds that hung sullenly over the city so that it was almost lost in the shadow, its lights as though snuffed out and even its constant noise dulled and distant. It appeared for a moment as though the world had opened to another time as all that was familiar was swallowed up. How thin the skin of the present is sometimes, stretched taught and almost transparent. And beneath it the turbulent dark. Subterranean currents moving to another pulse. While above the clamorous astonishment that had greeted each burst of brilliant light, just moments before, as people jostled and pressed together to see new wonders, was muted, to be replaced by an uneasy restless murmur. Some way off to the South, the silent volcano – and to the North-East, beyond the smoke and the villas along the bay, beyond the hillsides where the lemon groves used to be, and now are apartment blocks, there beyond the point, the sea floor rises and falls, small islands appear, and disappear as suddenly as they came, brief moments in light. The newspapers print a familiar paragraph, and topographic charts are rearranged. Gasping in the choking fumes the crowd stirred again to urgent life, showers of sparks fell from one last exploding star and people began to drift away, greeting each other and parting. Nothing had happened. The smoke was clearing. The still burning hulk was a long way off across the bay. (Craigie Horsfield)
Craigie Horsfield, les images (4)
Craigie Horsfield, les images (3)
At the carnival at Palma de Campania the February air was bitterly cold and as the light faded in the late afternoon a biting wind came up across the slope of the volcano. On the last day of the celebration groups of dancers and performers, several hundreds of people from different districts of the town, compete with each other in showing the costumes they have laboured on for months. In that winter, young men and women shivering in the cold trooped onto the stage excited and expectant as the last stragglers from the performance before were leaving. First one group then another would emerge from the press of figures to dance to the front of the high platform they stood on while their supporters in the crowd belocheered and shouted as they recognized their friends. In the intervals, as one group left and the next prepared to come on, the guest of honor was presented, a television starlet who stepped petulantly from her limousine into the cold to wave apathetically to the crowd as the MC extolled her fame over a megaphone, before she retreated, with evident relief, surrounded by fawning men vying to catch her attention, to take refuge again in her car. She was gone long before the last troupe of performers were being ushered on. The four young women were the first of their party, hesitant as they were pushed on to the stage to stand ready and watchful. Several other figures in extravagant costume danced on to take their positions but there was a pause. There was some confusion as those waiting to go on to the stage were being redirected and others were brought from the line that stretched into the shadows beyond the steps up to the platform. The young women became anxious and uncertain whether to stay in their allotted place, so exposed to the gaze of the crowd. There was a sense of the waiting figures, the young women in their now hesitant boldness and expectancy, being at a point of fragile equilibrium in which they appeared as though spectral, both older and younger than they were, caught between what had been and would not be again and that which was to come, that which was already forming and certain … but delayed, leaving them as though in suspension, irresolute, unable to leave, or to go on. The cold wind cut to the bone, and everywhere there was busy disorder, around the stage and amongst the crowd, but here only the movement of their white dresses as they stood swaying back and forward. And one dancing. (Craigie Horsfield)