With “Persona”, the painter Mounat Charrat is currently exhibiting at the Yakin&Boaz Gallery the patient and stubborn quest for what she deciphers under the mask of the individual. At once poetic, philosophical and aesthetic, this journey leads us to detect the beyond appearances and to search upstream for this residual trace of our origin, irreducibly human. A journey backwards where the history of our memory is written.

Looking for the human behind the mask of the individual

The individual is at the heart of Mounat Charrat's quest. But it is a question of seeking him in the infra-text that constitutes the history of the individual, which would have replaced by a purely social identity the humanity that founds the insurmountable character of the mystery of being. The human haunts and obsesses her like an infinite questioning that must then be resolved on the surface and in matter by letting sensations come about, the movement seek in the non-existent the face left in the imprint of nothingness. To go and restore meaning and form to the heads buried in the trace of a "before", because everything, in the artist's creative process, is made of this constant back and forth between appearance and disappearance... From matter, semblances of answers emerge that question us, without eyes, with the immensely open gaze of those who inhabit the world even when we believe them to be absent. They look at us, blindly, yes, and some call out, mouths open like a breach that fractures time, that swallows oblivion, that swallows its own despair to collect its cry. Metonymic individuals, they are what exceeds them, but also what is absent in them: a mouth that extrapolates the face; eyes whose trace persists beyond their erasure, stubbornly, the gaze turned towards the interiority of the being... Humanity is there, backwards. In an interior and limitless space where the layers of black that the painter applies, then of white, construct the depths of the unconscious where the irreducible enigma of being comes to anchor itself. There where depth agitates, terrible vertigo, the intensity that it wishes to make live in matter, because from it, in fact, the truth of the subject is nourished...

Mounat Charrat then evokes Munch's "The Scream", whose spirit she finds in one of her works, as a visceral call to this vertigo of the depths...and of which she has this intuitive awareness, anchored in the movement. A pencil stroke that seeks in the center of the canvas to first trace the contours where the imprint of the face could be inscribed, and which reveals it immediately, this original face, which everything then calls to disappear. However, it is he who makes the work, in short. The one we will never see but who tells us that what is erased can never really be forgotten. That the search for an earlier truth presides over the creation of the subject, that the painting is only the manifestation, on the surface, of distant questions that tie us to the consciousness of being, without managing to explain why or how, but that, simply, this calm and quiet confrontation of the obscure face that resurfaces from the forms of oblivion, that resists time and death, questions us beyond its quest, on the source of our own identity. Mute and silent quest, answers whispered in body and in writing, in letters and in being, that prolongs the abyss of each defeated look.

Humanity in reverse, yes, because it remains the residue, irreducibly, of the palimpsest that the successive layers of black and white evoke. In dripping, a technique that she sometimes uses, the writing is there well before, like a musical score in a state of incompleteness. A language before the verb, a word that precedes the cry, a look buried behind the face... Everything, in the Persona exhibition, reminds us that indeed the truth of being is below appearances. At the heart of the labyrinth. In the infra-matter of the living. And behind the impersonality of the faces, heads drawn like shells in which questions seem to explode in silence, we can read the standardization of a world where the individual disappears if the gaze does not take the trouble to look at him, and looking at him, to recognize him, failing to know his depth and interiority. Where the individual disappears into the societal I, of which his work on bodies in the form of puzzle pieces implicitly testifies. Because these aligned game pieces, with a playful appearance, actually cover a much more tragic questioning: "behind the body of each figure dressed in words, sentences, lies the shadow of a force and a hidden power," underlines the artist, who suggests that we can see beings obliged to play themselves against the rules of a game that is beyond them... Those of life, of course. Emerging from the void, some heads also emerge on the surface of an interlacing of ramifications of the being. And most of them, weightless in the frame of the painting, as our existential questions also keep us in suspense in our lives. "I had the strange sensation of being watched sometimes..." declares the artist, and she recalls, with a smile, this moment during which a dozen canvases had already invaded the studio.