Emmanuelle Bollack: Dualities
The library exhibited Emmanuelle Bollack's paintings on paper in its window from May 19th to June 10th, 2008.
« Dualities »
First there is the white, the milk and the flatness of the paper which thicken and reveal, with through the glaze, the pigments, or even the sands.
Then, just one form emerges and takes shape… It swells in substance, forms a skin, and makes an imprint in the granularity. One presence, then two: the shadow, the double – its sister ? the false one following – appears. But sometimes both suddenly appear, with the folds of the paper which, stuck together in the humidity, dries out and retains the impetus of a snatched movement.
Two bodies. They both form a pair and everything is played out between the two forms, in front of us; or they are torn apart, one of them pulls everything towards itself, rises up against the other – or waits, bent over, for the submission to stop.
Two, duos, duels… and us (she who is painting and I who am looking); what is written and created in the secrecy of the paper is addressed. The sharpness of the pencil sometimes gives a contour; the materials reveal the grain, the noise, the colour from which well up, if one listens carefully, some complaint or scream – or the silence that follows, caught up in the creased papers.
The events takes place in front of us, black on white, caught between the ink and the support which seem to remind us that they have, as for the stage, already been written… And when they take on the colours of ochre, or pink or grey, they bear witness to what has been played out without a text, where speech, stirred up by daily acts, immediately disappears into the sands of a strangely familiar continent.
J.D.
J.D.