«Death, come pull me underwater
I have nothing left to fear from hell»

Aldous Harding - Stop your tears (2014)

Chatting about the exhibition, Célia Muller apologizes for the nebulous conversation. She's keen not to say too much. She walks on eggshells so as not to fall into a space where pathos encroaches on the drawing. So as not to impede the state into which it might plunge us. The works engage us in a form of introspection, a plunge both into ourselves and into the artist's imagination, which combines the real with the evanescence of memory, or even the dream-nightmare. “When I draw, I break, I disappear. Her drawings are as much about escaping and fleeing as they are about obsessively pursuing faded memories. Celia Muller's relentless work is synonymous with anamnesis: a process of memory retrieval through additions, subtractions, fabrications and, of necessity, transformations of an altered narrative.

In this troubled journey, music merges with gesture and intuition. Before long, we're exchanging ideas and realizing that we're working in the same way: within a musical bubble where a few tracks or albums are listened to over and over again, to the point of disgust. Repetitive listening installs us in a state, an emotion, a mood that will set the tone for our projects. As I write this text, I'm listening to Aldous Harding, Stop Your Tears, a song that Célia Muller has been listening to incessantly since we started preparing the exhibition. She sends me a playlist, and I'm amused to note that she's much more talkative when she's talking about music. From Lingua Ignota to Fever Ray and Uboa, she mainly listens to women's voices with intense energies and universes. The tracks combine cathartic, brutal and violent moments with others that are more melancholy, dreamlike and comforting. I imagine her with her headphones screwed on, looking out of a window, at home, in the studio or elsewhere. I imagine the mental escape this “hole in the wall” provides. Beyond these openings, the sky has a special place. Like memory, the sky is an infinite space in constant metamorphosis. Just as the artist fixes fragments of her story, she fixes moments, states of cloudy, stormy, opaque, charged, luminous skies. Sky and memory share the same immensity, agitation, thickness and unpredictability. A space of disturbance.

Made up of shades of black, grey and white, the drawings impose a form of silence. They are the result of gestures and incantations towards the elements, towards memory, towards the invisible and the unspeakable. The artist utters multiple incantations in an intimate quest where words struggle to emerge. She manipulates anonymous photographs and others from her own family albums,
and others she has made herself during moments of isolation. The images constitute a material that she then reworks, selecting details and transposing them onto paper or silk. The paper of self. Célia Muller unfolds a self-portrait in time and space. An intimate self-portrait of secrets, silences, clues, states, emotions and intuitions. Talking about tissue paper, she tells me that once soaked, it becomes like skin, old and crumpled, a reassuring skin into which she tattoos snippets of her story.

Here we encounter hands extracted from anonymous and personal photographic sources. Unidentifiable hands that hark back to my story, hers and yours. It's here that fragility is transformed into an unlimited, collective force. Célia Muller tirelessly draws on a common material that never ceases to elude us. A dark, impalpable and alienating matter through which we learn to define ourselves, to undo ourselves and to exist.

Julie Crenn