“To pierce the landscape and find the space.” **
It was dawn, his home was just a glimmer in the dimness of the day, a white dot on his paper. As soon as these words were written, she set off. Towards the east, friendship, mists and mountains, wishes and crystal stones. Travel, travel like when she loses herself in her work: “Drawing is cathartic. I disappear and I go in. ” Where? She improvised an answer: “Each time, there is a idea-window, a hole in the wall.”
She was already far away, only just out of the École des Beaux-Arts, only just out of downtown Metz and the road was already losing its compass of reality. It lengthened, meandered, extended. The more the kilometers added up, the more the interior space expanded. She asked herself, like this, “Why do people stay in their house if it’s haunted?” In the waning morning sky, a ghost answered her, immaculate and floating like a cloud. But could one trust an answer from a ghost?
One ghost, two ghosts, the clouds accompanied her… These ghosts, friends of fantasy, could she trust them with these questions of a child, an artist, a woman and of the future? Within these horizons, she inevitably came across a whole crowd of memories, where none respected their own order of appearance. “The memory game fascinates me,” she thought, and immediately a photograph appeared in her mind. She would draw it in tattoo ink and pastel, as usual. In black and in contrasts, as always. “I’d like to find the depth of the surface, to seek the light in the dark.” She made statements to herself in the solitude of remembering a passion: “Walking in the forest at night, letting the irises adapt to the darkness. A question of intensity? Like that of the tiny white dots emerging luminously from the highly pigmented blacks of the drawings.
She knew in advance that her drawing would be diffuse, that it would seek this “in-between space, between the imaginary and the real”. Why? The answer emerges from the asphalt: “I find it difficult to show faces precisely, I don’t try to identify people or places because that creates a distance. While the rubbing-outs are surfaces for imaginary projection.”
As the distancing progressed, the lightness asserted itself. She began to hum, “Voyage, voyage.” She thought of the image of this young woman, dancing on a mountain. She had enjoyed drawing it. As always, the drawing had cropped the photo. “I always crop the original image,” she observed. It imposes the dimensions of the frame. I always have a frame within the frame.”A way of romanticising reality as she likes to do for these tiny old photos with scalloped edges, which were carried close to the heart for so long, in a pocket or a wallet, but close to the body.
The day dissolved into hours and miles. We should take a break soon. Near a mountain, she saw a woman holding a white quartz stone in her hands, like the beating heart of a ghost. She was moved to tears and felt overwhelmed with emotion. Like a huge wave of matte iron oxide with green and red reflections.
