Tant qu'il y aura des pierres.
195 x 210 cm
Toile sur châssis bois
Trouver le contact.
195 x 210 cm
Toile sur châssis bois
Une histoire sans fin #1.
130 x 140 cm
Toile sur châssis
Une histoire sans fin #5.
130 x 140 cm
Toile sur châssis
Une histoire sans fin #3.
130 x 140 cm
Toile sur châssis
Une histoire sans fin #2.
130 x 140 cm
Toile sur châssis
Une histoire sans fin #4.
130 x 140 cm
Toile sur châssis
Face to face.
110 x 90 cm
Toile sur châssis
Émancipation.
69 x 60 cm
Toile sur châssis
Une île quelque part.
70 x 60 cm
Toile sur châssis
Conscience solitaire.
30 x 30 cm
Toile sur châssis
Orange organique.
40 x 40 cm *2
Technique mixte sur bois
Liberté turquoise.
40 x 40 cm *2
Technique mixte sur bois
Temps suspendu.
30 x 40 cm *8
Technique mixte sur toile marouflée
Stone remains Mounat Charrat’s favorite motif, which she explores in all its facets. The starting point of the exhibition is a rock discovered in southern Morocco. Photographed in the artist’s hand, one would think one was facing a piece of ancient clay, which the Greek myth of Prometheus tells us was at the origin of human creation. Clayey earth from which sculptures and ceramics have been shaped since ancient times. By choosing this motif of stone, the artist accomplishes an immemorial gesture that takes us back, in the same way, to the origins of the universe. Among the different elements that make up nature, mineral is undoubtedly the oldest, but also the one that is always in contact with the other kingdoms. Whether we think of underwater pebbles, volcanic stones, or aerolites; minerals are constantly confronted with water, air, or fire.
A never ending story
Using the dripping technique, dear to Jackson Pollock – a technique consisting of placing the canvas on the ground and letting the paint flow – the visual artist manages to shape universes in motion in which the stone seems alternately animated by centrifugal or centripetal forces. We are not sure whether we are witnessing a cosmic explosion reminiscent of the Big Bang theories, a volcanic eruption or perhaps a reordering of a world that is too chaotic.
By placing the exhibition under the sign of utopia, dear to the English philosopher Thomas More, Mounat Charrat sometimes seems to call for a better world in which human beings would also take the time to look, with a new and probably much more humble look, at the world around them. Several canvases on frames thus produce an effect of interaction between the mineral and anonymous portraits, as if man still had much to learn from a nature that he takes pleasure, day after day, in ransacking and destroying.
If we take the time, as the artist invites us to do, to contemplate a simple stone; perhaps we will be sensitive to the diversity of forms, to the richness of the lineaments that compose it, to the very materiality of an object to which painters have devoted themselves for centuries. Still lifes developed in painting during the Renaissance, contemporary with the writings of the humanist philosopher Thomas More to whom homage is paid here. It is such a Copernican revolution of the gaze that Mounat Charrat asks us to accomplish here, by rediscovering the humble pleasure of contemplating this “mute world” of which the poet Francis Ponge said that it was our “only homeland.”
A lonely conscience
However, the playful dimension is not totally absent from this work. The artist thus enjoys playing on the analogies that stone sometimes maintains with the human face or brain. By placing two stones of different composition side by side, one would also believe to see a mountain, a boat or even a snail appear. The multiplicity of the sensible world is also a call to weave all these correspondences that are one of the reasons for art. Knowing what resonances the different elements of nature maintain with each other constitutes, without doubt, the most indecipherable of mysteries that no algorithm will ever be able to pierce.
But there remains perhaps an even more astonishing analogy: that which links the mineral to writing. We know that the first supports for writing were, since antiquity, tablets; most often made of wood, but sometimes also from materials such as slate or stone. This is the case of the Tablets of the Law, which are mentioned, for example, in the Old Testament. The exhibition also develops the motif of the Koranic tablet – even though the motif of the stone also recalls the Black Stone located in the precincts of the Ka’aba in Mecca – through several wooden louhat, reminding us how materiality has always been linked to thought and language. If we lose sight, at a time when digital arts resonate with the fallacious promises of a dematerialized world, of the intimate relationship that connects every man to wood and mineral; Mounat Charrat warns us that outside of matter, there is perhaps no salvation. Before thinking about saving our souls, let us start by preserving the world that saw us born: utopia today comes at this price!
Olivier Rachet.
Exhibition [E]utopia by Mounat Charrat, until December 9, 2017.
