Anne Brégeaut
Blending the imaginary world of tales and elements from everyday life, Anne Bré-geaut's paintings evoke a strange place that is a mix of gentleness and anxiety.
Behind their childlike appearance as brightly colored vinyl paintings, Anne Brégeaut's works inhabit an intermediary state, between realism and fantasy, between the time of memory and that of projection, between painting and sculpture, canvas and volume. And her frequent evocations of the imaginary world are always deliberately ambiguous; it is at once closed and limitless. Partaking of the same spirit, cheerful and disturbing elements cohabit, brought together by the use of foreshortening. Placed on the same plane, they coexist in a spatio-temporal world that is infused with strangeness.
As in tales, Brégeaut's images are colorful and dotted with figures. Imaginary worlds unfold here, in which features of our own world are metamorphosed by the play of scale and dis-placement. Also as in tales, people take tea, travel through magic forests and islands. And as in tales, the picture is not quite as rosy as it looks. These images contain ambiguous symbols and features that only discerning eyes will detect. Sometimes, the titles themselves are ambiguous or contain wordplay that heightens the ambiguity, encouraging psy. chological interpretations (La Fortresse de la solitude, 2010; T'avais qu'à pas [You just had to...], 2009...). In others, a reference to a TV series or a film instills a distinctive atmosphere (Bridget l'attendait ave impatience (Bridget waited impatiently], 2008, Hollywood, 2014).
In fact, there are multiple themes running through these works: intimacy of course, but above all the relation to the other, whether via desire, argument or lack, or again illusion, dream and the construction of mental spaces.
As painting sets out to conquer life here, so it escapes its usual frame in peaks and curves that draw mountains and intertwining bodies.
It enlaces itself with tables and shelves that are pressed into the narrative (Le Petit Vase vert, 2013; Entre nous, 2014) to evoke domestic interiors that have undergone strange transformations. Often, the artist multiplies viewpoints, as in her Paysages oubliés, sculptures of bits of landscape that can be moved around on wheels, like childhood memories.
Implicitly, her works point to a certain fragility: that of memory, objects and, by extension, our own fragility as human beings.
Now exhibited in numerous French art centers (Le Creux de l'Enfer in Thiers, Centre d'Art Contemporain de Meymac, Le Plateau-FRAC Ile-de-France, Le Parvis de Tarbes, La Maison des Arts de Malakoff, and, this sum-mer, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Pontmain) and at Galerie Sémiose in Paris, Anne Brégeaut did her post-diploma course in Nantes in 1994-95. She remembers it as a time of intense exchanges, both with students (French and international) and with art world figures (artists, gallerists, critics, curators) who, every month, contribute to the friendly. rich and professionally fruitful exchanges held at the school.
Pascaline Vallée, 10/12/ 2019, in Art Press spécial Nantes