ANGèle guerre
... BECS & ONGLES
SEPTIEME GALLERY, PARIS, FRANCE
november 19, 2021 – january 08, 2022
It crunches, grazes and slips.
The gesture is ancestral, the materials are raw. Paper, leather, bronze and ochre in pastel. It is the land of the ancestors, mine and others. They appear in the caves and in my memories with warm colors, fire, flints, scents of inks and a crackling noise.
The hands are strong.
The skin is soft.
The wound is tender.
The blade is sharp.
I don’t want to be nostalgic but I want to recover the strength of the gesture through repetition and joy. It is heat that we need. Souples, un souffle (Supple, a breath) are modular, resilient, adaptable sculptures. There is paper, because the fibers are vibrant. There is leather, because this skin, which was worn, damaged and thrown away, I salvaged. The two materials work together: the paper strengthens the leather, the leather softens the paper. They are much stronger than they look. The iron pierces as much as it supports and accompanies. It shows the direction when the material gives the body. They are carcasses and they are flights.
Sharp objects in a corps sauvage (Wild body), still the same thing but in another dimension. Against a wall, gently pressed, planted, the ambivalence of the materials proposes both a fight and a union.
An animality against an animosity, a tenderness.
From a land of ochre earth, the troubled lands take their roots. They are landscapes shaped by hand, patiently ploughed, allowing for crevices and stories to appear.
Like the tendre textes (tender texts), which owe their relief only to the light, a low-angled light that clings. Instead of writing, I draw. The drawing becomes writing and the scalpel a pen that scratches.
Les caressantes (The caressing), hands of always, of the old painters and the choreographies of the everyday. I wanted them small, for their vulnerability, in bronze, so that they carry their weight.
Tooth and nail, to continue with a ferocious joy.
