Dans L'Ombre / 2011

La folie et la grâce
Notes sur une installation de Gwen Gérard

Entrer. C’est d’abord l’écran. Puis l’image en retour, un duel d’ombres s’engage, celle qui sourd, à basse intensité, attend, juste et sobre contour, sans grains, sans traits, sans je, sans voix, et la vôtre, qu’on imagine passée au tamis du lin, de son sable de lumière, à contre-sens et contre-temps de sa courbe spectrale, passée, déjà, de l’autre côté du miroir, et en allée butter sur les capitons, les cerceaux blancs qui servent à tenir les débords improbables du corps, ou sur la pièce à sons.

Et douze apôtres de lumière. Leurs têtes de coptes fatigués. La grâce en chacun d’un aleph improbable. Chaque lueur est un nom. Et les mémoires ? Il y a douze apôtres, mais quatre évangiles. Il y a douze lanternes, et quatre paroles. Quatre canons de l’enténèbrement. De la plus grande singularité. C’est qu’on encamisole rudimentaire quand trop de singulier se met en vibration. Un vrai bourdon, parfois, un territoire sans marque, une erre infinie.

Et s’installe soudain ce paradoxe sous l’œil, celui de la tête folle et de sa mousseline, des pensées agitées, des phases fébriles et de leur douce somnolence, une et leur multiple, du bruit, de la violence, de sa logique privative, du langage séquestré. Thème – et preuve de la difficulté. Comment nommer ? Les catégories s’arrangent pour ombrer, comme elles cherchent à localiser. L’ombre, elle, quand on est au piémont de l’âme, donne à voir. Elle est survie projetée. Croyance, au moins, du survivre. Ou de la métamorphose. Celle qui dans le caillou craint le minotaure. Dans le moineau anticipe le tonnerre. Dans l’air disperse les cendres. C’est le pari sans métaphore de ces capsules, de l’anti-forme de ces doublures, leurs filandres, leurs sangs cardés. Quatre, cette fois, comme il y en a trois ailleurs qui ont la grâce d’une renaissance. Trois corps contourés et pleins en torsade : les cariatides du miroir rouge. Le cri, et les chuchotements. Les sœurs, et ce tesson qui passe et lacère l’intime. En pleine lumière. Et on ne voit pas. Et puis ces quatre femmes-fil, dans leur ombre. Explore-t-on leur symbole ? Leur expansive minimalité ? Femmes flottantes et murales dans le même temps, dont on reste à investiguer la pulsion. La façon dont ça se noue dans leur dos. Les points de repli. Leurs broderies. Le soin et le vertige. Comment le sang leur coule.

Un transfert, un agencement. Eva Hesse et Georges de La Tour. Leur rencontre de jute. Ou de lin. D’autres noms viennent aussi. Mais les figures sont en absence. Elles dérivent, flux, immatériel sonore retenu par la projection. Comme une chambre à fantasme. Un coffre à secrets. Une tête hermétique et tant peuplée. Son, sang, sable : les qualités premières de ceux qui partent.

Encore ceci. Un schéma mystique, sans le support de foi. Umbrae est à l’homme, ce que lumen est à l’ange, lux à Dieu – et tenebrae à l’animal. Un déplacement.

Dans l’ombre n’a pas d’antithèse.

Nycéphore Burladon
1/03/2012

C. Vague.S / 2022

https://www.gwengerard.com/c-vague-s

The installations "Divagué.e.s", "Elle Ael", "Cabossé.e.s", "Portrait par Trois", "Silhouette Au Coin", " Poché.e.s" , " La Sillhouette relit", " Ombres en Mouvement" , " A L'Orée", "Re- Coin" grouped under the title "C.Vague.S" speak of my aunt diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1950s. I spent a month with her and my grandmother in Brest between my 7 and a half to 8 and a half months. But that was never told to me.
After undergoing the annihilating psychiatric treatments of that time, my aunt spent most of her life in the Morlaix psychiatric hospital.In the 1980s, following abortive art studies, I decided to be part of "the so-called active life". Through my next-door neighbor, I learned about the nursing profession in the psychiatric sector whose studies were paid. (which has not been the case since 1992) and got involved.
For nearly thirty years, parallel to my activity as a plastic artist, I therefore practiced that of nursing in the psychiatric sector and then of art therapist, a profession which also allows me to finance my artistic practice. Remaining aware of their inadequacy and opposition: one linked to the disorder of creativity and the other to the order of knowledge and the institution, I chose to combine them, to find bilateral correspondences, in particular between process of creativity and identity reconstruction (* 2) while questioning the principles of unity and harmony.
When my aunt died in May 2008, I spontaneously picked up her things: a suitcase full of photographs. Most of them were from people I didn't know, because in my youth we never visited this part of the family.
Throughout my life I was born in 1956, I did not understand all these knots that attached me to my aunt and to Breton soil, yet it never ceased to call me in my flesh, to surprise me while beyond my comprehension. I was just seeing a sort of analogy, correspondence that often had a special relationship with patients with schizophrenia and a particular attraction to theories about the origin of the emotional connection.
These photos with the precise dates and places inscribed on their backs, I looked at them many times without seeing anything in particular. The 2020 lockdown made me dwell on them and allowed me to look at them at greater length.And that's when I understood this happy month and this access to happiness that my aunt had transmitted to me, this indelible mark left in my being: mind and body combined.
These installations that are part of the same “C.Vague.S” body of work served as a starting point for photos that my aunt kept close to her throughout her life. I designed this series as a "dialogue between water and wind", where the images of my aunt are intertwined with the women through sculptures, installations: a way to join our memories, our stories in a new account, of give body to a life left in institutional shadow. For this series, the shadow is transformed into a source of light, the one that shines and is recognized. Linked to the meeting of water and wind creating this perpetual movement of ebb and flow, the "C-Vague. S" installations are like eternal return where "This is the new always old, and of old always new ” (*1).

(*1)Auguste Blanqui - L’Éternité par les astres, 1872
(* 2) Succinctly, during psychic decompensation phenomena, different reconstruction processes whether it is dreamlike, fabulation, hallucinations, interpretations can be likened to plastic processes such as analogy, diversion, metaphor , the cut up etc. In both cases, a singular associative principle links the constituents together to access a story, qualified as delusional, and therefore incomprehensible, in a psychiatric field and poetic in art in general. As an art therapist, my plastic practice, linked to the world of the image and its associations, allowed me to access these imaginary worlds, to feel them, to consider them above all in their poetic aspect and thus to recognize them as a communicating story. Inspired by this, I have always been interested in the paradoxical alliance of elements that question the notions of causality, univocity, and their "unusual" links opening, in my eyes, new spaces and possibilities.

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