<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00abDeath, come pull me underwater
I have nothing left to fear from hell\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aldous Harding - Stop your tears (2014)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When discussing the exhibition, C\u00e9lia Muller apologises for the nebulous conversation. She doesn\u2019t want to say too much about it. She\nwalks 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\nplunge us. The works engage us in a form of introspection, a dive into both ourselves and the artist\u2019s imagination which combines reality\nwith the evanescence of memory or even the nightmare dream. \u201cWhen I draw, I leave, I disappear.\u201d The drawings reflect her escapes, her\nflights, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On this hazy journey, music merges with gestures and intuitions. Quite quickly we discuss this subject and we realise that we work in the\nsame way: within a musical bubble where a few tracks or albums are listened to over and over again, until we\u2019re sick of them. Repetitive liste-\nning puts us into a state, an emotion, a mood that sets the tone for our projects. As I\u2019m writing this text, I\u2019m listening to Aldous Harding\u2019s,\nStop Your Tears, a song that C\u00e9lia Muller has been listening to constantly since she started preparing for the exhibition. She sends me a\nplaylist and I notice amusedly that she is much more effusive when she talks about music. From Lingua Ignota to Fever Ray, via Uboa, she\nmainly listens to the voices of women with intense energies and universes. The pieces combine cathartic, brutal and violent moments with\nothers that are more melancholic, dreamlike and comforting. I imagine her with her headphones wrapped around her head, looking out of\na window, at home, in her workshop or elsewhere. I imagine the mental escape provided by this \u201chole in the wall\u201d. Beyond these openings,\nthe sky finds a prominent role. Just like memory matter, the sky is an infinite space undergoing constant metamorphosis. In the same way\nthat the artist fixes on fragments of her story, she fixes on moments, on states of cloudy, stormy, opaque, charged or luminous skies. The sky\nand the memory share the same immensity, the same agitation, the same thickness and the same unpredictability. A space of disruptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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-\nds the elements, towards memory matter, towards the invisible and the inexpressible. The artist launches multiple incantations in an intimate\nquest where words struggle to emerge. She thus manipulates anonymous photographs, others from her own family\u2019s albums and others\nagain that she herself took during moments of isolation. The images constitute a subject that she will then rework by selecting details that\nshe transposes onto the sheet of paper or the sheet of silk paper. A silk-portrait. It is a recessed self-portrait that C\u00e9lia Muller deploys in time\nand space. A most intimate self-portrait made up of secrets, silences, hints, states, emotions and intuitions. Talking about silk paper, she tells\nme that once soaked it becomes like skin, old and wrinkled; a reassuring skin onto which she tattoos snippets of her history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We encounter hands taken from anonymous and personal photographic sources. Unidentifiable hands that refer to my story, to her story, to yours. This is\nwhere the fragility transforms into an unlimited strength because it is collective. C\u00e9lia Muller tirelessly draws on common material that conti-\nnues to elude us. A dark, impalpable and alienating matter through which we learn to define ourselves, to unravel ourselves and to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Julie Crenn<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":1290,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-1289","exposition","type-exposition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-passees"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exposition"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}