«Death, come pull me underwater
I have nothing left to fear from hell»
Aldous Harding - Stop your tears (2014)
When discussing the exhibition, Célia Muller apologises for the nebulous conversation. She doesn’t want to say too much about it. She
walks on eggshells so as not to fall into a place where the pathos would encroach on the drawing. To not hinder the state into which it could
plunge us. The works engage us in a form of introspection, a dive into both ourselves and the artist’s imagination which combines reality
with the evanescence of memory or even the nightmare dream. “When I draw, I leave, I disappear.” The drawings reflect her escapes, her
flights, as much as an obsessive pursuit of vanished memories. Celia Muller works relentlessly where drawing is synonymous with anamnesis: a memory journey built up through additions, subtractions, fabulations and necessary transformations of an altered story.
On this hazy journey, music merges with gestures and intuitions. Quite quickly we discuss this subject and we realise that we work in the
same way: within a musical bubble where a few tracks or albums are listened to over and over again, until we’re sick of them. Repetitive liste-
ning puts us into a state, an emotion, a mood that sets the tone for our projects. As I’m writing this text, I’m listening to Aldous Harding’s,
Stop Your Tears, a song that Célia Muller has been listening to constantly since she started preparing for the exhibition. She sends me a
playlist and I notice amusedly that she is much more effusive when she talks about music. From Lingua Ignota to Fever Ray, via Uboa, she
mainly listens to the voices of women with intense energies and universes. The pieces combine cathartic, brutal and violent moments with
others that are more melancholic, dreamlike and comforting. I imagine her with her headphones wrapped around her head, looking out of
a window, at home, in her workshop or elsewhere. I imagine the mental escape provided by this “hole in the wall”. Beyond these openings,
the sky finds a prominent role. Just like memory matter, the sky is an infinite space undergoing constant metamorphosis. In the same way
that the artist fixes on fragments of her story, she fixes on moments, on states of cloudy, stormy, opaque, charged or luminous skies. The sky
and the memory share the same immensity, the same agitation, the same thickness and the same unpredictability. A space of disruptions.
Made up of shades of black, gray and white, the drawings impose a form of silence. They are the results of gestures and incantations towar- ds the elements, towards memory matter, towards the invisible and the inexpressible. The artist launches multiple incantations in an intimate quest where words struggle to emerge. She thus manipulates anonymous photographs, others from her own family’s albums and others again that she herself took during moments of isolation. The images constitute a subject that she will then rework by selecting details that she transposes onto the sheet of paper or the sheet of silk paper. A silk-portrait. It is a recessed self-portrait that Célia Muller deploys in time and space. A most intimate self-portrait made up of secrets, silences, hints, states, emotions and intuitions. Talking about silk paper, she tells me that once soaked it becomes like skin, old and wrinkled; a reassuring skin onto which she tattoos snippets of her history.
We encounter hands taken from anonymous and personal photographic sources. Unidentifiable hands that refer to my story, to her story, to yours. This is where the fragility transforms into an unlimited strength because it is collective. Célia Muller tirelessly draws on common material that conti- nues to elude us. A dark, impalpable and alienating matter through which we learn to define ourselves, to unravel ourselves and to exist.
Julie Crenn
