16:44
"The misfortune we wish to stop—does it not arm itself?" — Monique Wittig
"I love that feeling that words do what they want to do and what they must do". — Gertrude Stein
Addressed to Anne-Lise Coste (Rodrigue) and to you.
You must feel that same sensation when you work on these free canvas drawings you create with colored pencil, whose pigments blaze when, with thousands of your arms, you wear them down. Yellow is a very bright sun (it is warm when you touch it), green is chlorophyllous, and red, fresh blood. Your studio days resemble a mission for which you surpass yourself in strength and constancy. I think of the softness you encounter on that carpet where, following your impulses, you rub and grow true balls of entangled temporalities, only to later veer toward ruler-guided, orderly drawings. Of course, thoughts do what they want, but you cannot escape what you must do and what you willingly choose to do, in the porosity of your own flesh. Isn’t it wonderful to know that beings of flesh like us invent a language more beautiful than our own to overcome our traumas?
If you draw a flower, you make it grow. Your relationship with nature is luminous—you who are always so joyful walking through a landscape or welcoming it into your poems. Your relationship with art goes hand in hand with the courage to arm yourself, so as not to yield to the influence of beings of war and domination. Your sword—you have miraculously found it, and you carry it with you always. Who trained you to face life, if not the experience of art? Who simply told you: what you can do, what you know how to do—do it. That very sign is painting.
You pursue greedy forms whose vitality testifies to this will-to-live, like the sturdy leather around your sword. It takes courage to distance oneself from the heap of manure on which some are born. We share common drives. You know it, and I know it. As I know that you have tilled, with your brown pencil, that piece of fermented earth before it gently solidified. One must wander a lot to approach freedom. One must make sure that neither anything nor anyone weighs too heavily upon us. You still aim true with this blushing stick insect who lives to feel. Tears and joys. May everything meet on the same surface, as if within yourself. The surface of the canvas is sometimes so thin it could be mistaken for paper. You play with fragility with great power, and with finesse. Words have the uninterrupted interlinking of chainmail. Your canvases are thoughts transformed into armor and flags.
16:44
Your plexus explodes into a bouquet. Your body lets out a great “Ha!” as when you receive an invitation to pleasure. I can already imagine the light transport of all these canvases rolled together. By friction, they contain what organizes your life and your survival. They are delicate, persistent molts. It is an entire horizon that you lift from the floor, making it gain the verticality of the exhibition. Verticality is both joy and mourning. You seek another rhythm without breaking the organic connection between the works. It is then that the previous perspective is no longer the same. You also play a game against several opponents who might try to follow you as one raises an army.
- Cécilia Becanovic