La « scul(p)einture », un joyeux flirt orchestré par Aurélie Menaldo
by Hélène De Montgolfier
AS THE WORLD FALLS DOWN
While the world stumbles and heads towards its own destruction, and beyond the apocalyptic title of the exhibition – borrowed from Bowie1 – Aurélie Menaldo raises the question : « Is joy within our reach? […] If chaos reigns, it gives us the freedom to change things, to hit the bottom hoping that everything will bounce back differently ». An offbeat breath of oxygen, unexpected and tangible from the very threshold of the exhibition : « Paradise Lost2 ».
PARADISE LOST
The artist places an imposing creature at the entrance. Using swimming pool noodles, she designs a spider-like silhouette with childhood curves and colours. And with a solid stroke of the pen, she shoes the curved tentacles with heavy suction clogs. The colour-changing foam tubes denote cheerfulness : the painting-sculpture starts to move, leaving behind some reluctant limbs anchored down by the concrete, and departs from its floor space to savour the marble of the chimney.
« Abandon in order to better escape, to move forward » prompts the artist- designer. A first step towards freedom. This Liberty, like an American-style statue, decapitated and downsized to meet the needs of an aquarium decor, the prison for fish : it « reaches for the sky » on a luxury column, sheathed in soft dark green suede. Its tiara is enriched with coloured balls and the elegant fern corolla hides, behind fake gold, its plastic origins.
Creativity is having fun. The skin texture of the famous crowned head transmutes into textures imposed by a mischievous but merciless brush which will subject the star and its symbol to pecking by cageless birds attracted to settle on the perches between two attacks. Horror : the eyes have gone!
« Nature always returns and intervenes where we expect it least ». Other columns of the same diameter line up one after the other. A proposal to wander through entertaining decors ? A proposal to contemplate hieratic characters ? A question of perspective and imagination …
Elegant, intriguing, the tall cylinder gloved in deep blue adorns itself with long spikey brushes playing their part or with the tails of fleeing Marsupilami comic characters. They sketch out a strange graphic overflow with curved and unbound figures – formed by doormat refills.
Further on, thrilled to be promoted to the rank of fountain, the coloured assembly of baby pools, rainbow pyramid rings, zesty bowls and salad dishes, gives sound to a milky liquid, the only sound associated with the displays.
« Offbeat references, universes recreated ».
The last column conjures up a New York building, like the minaret of a mosque, like the crest of a circus marquee, flaunting a gemstone or an encumbrance ? A long gold chain … gold is ever present in Aurélie Menaldo’s work.
A promise of nobility attached to the simplicity of plastic free of complexes. A fanfare of a creator who believes in a better future : « I’ll paint you mornings of gold »3.
On the wall, soberly framed, the ordinary survival blanket, folded into a hundred equal squares, displays its protective brilliance for its single use for tragic needs. A support which is intrinsically linked to the artist, and often present in her
work : she uses a laser cutter to carve out shapes from it.
Objects or words that count and fall, leaving only a trace of their passage, only existing through the printed emptiness in the extreme lightness of the page. A poignant echo of emptiness, of life’s fragility, which fills the first six pages of an « ongoing monograph».4
The first of these pages delineates the IPN beam in the shape of a cross, forming the artificial reefs, a foreign body adopted by the shellfish which flourish there. The second page reproduces a quote from Pessoa5 much appreciated by the respectful copier. The third page revives an exquisite phrase from the song Osez Joséphine – Be Bold Josephine – by Baschung6. « Plus rien ne s’oppose à la nuit » – Nothing more can challenge the night.
The fourth and fifth pages, both stylised models, act out the hieroglyphs. The sixth is a reference to an installation made from vegetal charcoal briquettes, black and dull, the poor relatives of Othoniel bricks7.
Their diminished size reduces them to the small holes of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Poinçonneur des Lilas” 8 or even the punch card of a barrel organ. Other pages will follow ….
This is where Paradise Lost leaves us. Filled with colours, narrated in an entertaining way, populated by plastic objects which have lost their purpose and adapt happily to their new destination, accompanied by the silence of the music (Bowie, Baschung, Christophe, Gainsbourg) and marked by the seal of words (Milton et Pessoa…)
INTERLUDE
The ambitious sets of painting-by-numbers proclaim « to become an artist ». A mix of innocence and irony, the picture is presented in an art library … placed at the border of the artist’s two universes, it is intentionally unfinished. The white space on the canvass reveals the nudity of the parrots. The red feathers are seen again in the suspended boa. A theatrical spotlight on the installation, a perfect sphere which brings together others : the one at the base of the columns and the Walt Disney pale moon in “The music box – Blue Bayou”, the title of the second space of the exhibition. A connecting sphere, therefore …
BLUE BAYOU
“The hero of the second of ten short films from the Disney studios, a large white bird takes off in the moonlight. It flies in a solitary manner”9 and inspires the artist with the title of her last installation, her final story. All the objects involved (set out at regular intervals in spite of being hung at different levels) reproduce the glossary of a birdcage (perches, smokescreens, coloured cords for nest threads …), and play a part in the weirdness of a sensation : that of a presence that will no longer be, that of the temporality of a peculiar interval. Uneasiness born from the observation of specific details.
The angel’s wing has been pierced by a hostile arrow. The necklace of plastic beads of the stylish bell-shaped swing is itself a bell. Three bells to ring out the three daily Angelus prayers. The tri-cones show off the crotches of the trapeze artists or the “nanas” of Niki10 dressed in white tights and wearing ballet shoes – coloured shells or unicorn horns – all the suspensions are conspicuously and solidly secured together; and if everything moves, turns, floats, nothing will fall or alter the harmony created by the relationships of shifting shapes, of mundane items and of pungent colours.
Exhibition at the GAC//Groupe d’Art Contemporain (Contemporary Art Group) in Annonay, France