THE BLUE OF HER LOOK

Beached like whales on the shore, the bodies are moored. Suspended in the branches of time, in flight. They haven’t clung or held back; they have fallen. With Icarus’ dream in mind, irremediably. Because it is much too intoxicating. Lightened of the energies of the insides, ridden of the weight of their entrails, of their ardent desires, they remain. Their wings, too-light twigs, are drying in a corner, in the heat of the light. They are dripping, shiveringly, scratched by the pliers of the skies. It is the stained glass of our memory that filters the sun – so as not to forget. All of History is reflected there. The transparency of their membranes vibrates in the air like the minute breeze which allows these two long lungs cut off from their organs to breathe on. They are the laid down, they are asleep.

Others will say they have slumped, their feet caught in the carpet. To push the door and to collapse in the asymmetry of the bars. The formidable, meticulously orchestrated sway of the tripped-up bodies. A collective dance which plays on colour in its choreography. Beam and pommel horse. Athletics is not their forte. Yet they are majestic, terrifying. Having been halted in their course, they lay there like lowly rugs. They have dried, lost their water and bones. Only their skin remains: no longer able to stand, dripping body and soul. They are the lion hides brought back from the hunt. That of Ricardo Brey, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil and his premonitory unicorn of the United Kingdom, pinned down, sagging: Gloriosus. The skin as remain, symptom of an exotic, fantasized existence. Witness to a battlefield and an assured victory. The absent bodies are the trophies of another time, another reality where neither men nor beasts would have found a common language. Only the bodies speak and remain, immortal. The flesh becomes a coat and protects from the world. Adherent and souple, it fits as tightly as the double skin of those frogmen who revert to animals in their underwater diving. Between heavens and deeps is the Earth. In suspension.

How to tell with images what the bodies transpire? Soaked in water and ethylic juices, they are declined in all positions through the stencils of a bewildering, erotic, sensual study. The paper drinks up the mark of their passage at the pace of the swings and prolonges their trajectory.

One last image. That of the empty bodies. Emptied of being and meaning, dispossessed, hurt by barbarism, where nothing is left, hardly the irreductibe. The drawings of Zoran Music. The bodies as skeletons, as twigs. To draw the unspeakable. To mould what shows so as to show what cannot be seen. And to go backwards, to revert things. To bring out the soft, the flaccid, the inchoate, that which doesn’t contain itself, which escapes. Like the other structure of oblivion: the hollow echoing the full, the bark echoing the inside. The print of what remains, too. To retrieve one’s envelope, one’s membrane, the placenta of the first instant, to escape and die. To leave one’s body, to abandon it in order to soar. Whew.

Elsewhere, fingers touch and point at each other. They interrogate, seek one another. A code of signs known and recognized, declined in a vocabulary of unlikely colours. Again, the envelope. Household rubber gloves are not far away, all wrinkled and limp, protective, we are told. The strange artifice of this body double as if, once again, the living had left. Only the evidence remains, as language and cultural borrowing; it designates and witnesses. The choreography goes on, here it is the other dance, that of the fingers.

The blue of her look, with time, through time, has softened the angles, reverted the approaches. The soft has taken over the hard. The skeletons she once carved and tamed, infusing them with a mechanical, energetic, mobile life, have become souple, fluid puddles. She used to invent for them feelings and passions, to force them to love and battle each other, in the violence of clashes. She has polished and caressed them with her eyes, she has listened to them, left them to rest, while sculpting, hollowing out and infiltrating the soupleness of bodies. She has taken her distance and trusted them. They float now, in the immense ocean.

Julie Rouge, February 2010

Hipparion, Élodie Lefebvre exposition, 22nd January 2010, Lesalonreçoit, Toulouse