Anne-Sarah Le Meur Limit Light PROGRAMMED IMAGES In the depths of her being, the machine ... oozes. There beat numbers, operations, calculations. Percent colors on the screen. Between cables and software, by interposed graphics card, across memory, the artist programs and contaminates serious geometry. In the strange virtual and immaterial space, the light oscillates, prances and generates forms. The colors evolve, burst, fade. Blows and sweets, glances and yawns, aspirations. One day, one value - not just any! -, inverted - to see! - has reversed the light ... then become negative, absorbing and black. Initially black (them too), pseudo-cosmic, the backgrounds soon dared to change: red, pink ... Movements of surface, of tones, of time. Renewed abstraction and spatial sensations. For the past thirty years, Anne-Sarah Le Meur has been tapping on a keyboard to create images. Tirelessly, she types and tests her lines of code, her variables, her loops, her conditions, to explore and regenerate color in moving and infinite tables. "Then you will make a veil of azure, purple, scarlet, and twisted linen, it will be artistically made, damask it with cherubim" in Exodus, Chapter 26 Translation of the Rabbinate Discovering the process and the works by Anne-Sarah Le Meur, and in particular those indicated in the preamble, I was touched by the articulation of the colors, obtained through the powers of calculation and virtuality, with what comes under the veil. The appearance of the colors in the always oscillating plane of the veil, simultaneously fold and unfold, and, let us note, this dual of colors (scarlet and bluish purple), clearly named ArGaMaN and TeKèleT in the Hebrew of the First Testament , has renewed in myself what I call a reflexive mediation about the radicality of abstraction: withdrawal of the figurable, vibratory states freed from the imperative of representation, from the illusory or illusionist redoubling of what is called , wrongly, the reality ... The description of the veil of the temple or Parokhet, in verses 31 and 36 of chapter 26 of Exodus, is a decisive moment in Judaic reflection about the gaze and the vocation of artistic gesture, between the visible world and that which cannot receive any image, the Kadosh Hakadoshim or Holy of Holies, located just behind a series of veils. The last veil, or Parokhet, separates the Saint, where the assistance is held, from a second place, where is the Ark of the Covenant (the Holy of Holies), a box in which are tightened the scrolls of the Torah. . This biblical description is at the origin of crucial issues in the history of artistic creation: it founds the pejorative contestation of abstraction as a Semitic emanation. Greco-Roman culture, then Christianity, and later, any policy taking images as emblems of powers and dominions, will consider such an abstraction inadmissible, because it cannot be recovered by the propaganda of images between monumentality and sentimentality. Evidenced by Hitler's hatred for abstraction, designating it as specifically Jewish art. More broadly, in our current world, held as never before by the collective communication of images, is not abstraction always misunderstood, denied, held to be outdated or reduced to a decorative variation? Abstraction, in the history of modern and contemporary art, occurs just before the horror of the First War and totalitarianisms, and will be taken up and revisited, in Europe as in the United States, after the abominations of second world war (Shoah and atomic bombings). The great American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) did not randomly adopt the unimagined extent of frayed and vibrating colors and particularly those purples which drift between orange and black. The Parokhet, or veil of the temple, became the determining device of his work, as he became aware of the dread of the Shoah (remember that Rothko arrived at 10 years old on American soil in 1913). In a text - The artist's reality - written during World War II, the painter declares that the artist's mission is to repair the world. It seems obvious to us that the work of Anne-Sarah Le Meur is in direct relation with this radical abstraction, that of the vibratory veil without images. Having become a path of artistic emancipation between 1910 and 1915, abstraction implements an experience of art that escapes the image as a generalized technological means of reproduction and dissemination. Abstraction, by claiming the prevalence of the plan of the painting against the illusionist depth of perspective, privileging the interior experience, questions what constitutes the image as a power of fascination and persuasion, namely propaganda and falsifying manipulation. In the periods of democratic collapse and transition to war, via the precursor episodes of civil wars, this common feature emerges: the confusion between the place of images and the place of personal experience, then struck down as forbidden, nor recognized or even named. Thus, abstraction carries with it, fundamentally, a duel for ever open: rejection of the powers of the image as a double that can take the place of anything and any creature, against the fascination for the illusion of the probable. In this, it is deeply political. More: this oscillating plane is not without figures and, particularly, in Rothko as in our artist, we find those of negativity: dark tones, darkness, ambivalence, erotic color, void ..., Experienced by inversion degrees of light in colors. But isn't it up to the artist to assume the recognition of the negative as a power at work, negative if not hidden by the illusion of figuration? For Rothko, revealing the power of the negative through the means of art refers to Tikkun Haolam: the service of repairing the world, the artist's mission. In our chaotic times, after this first confinement-confinement, multiplying the sessions of tele-presences and other illusory image systems, by the liberal alliance of a visual empire with an impoverished collective communication, in an atmosphere of fascination for the techniques of replacing man in his images, avatars and robots, this element suddenly comes back to us: what are our conscience and our responsibility, to each and everyone? The artist, so misunderstood and mistreated today, despite proclamations, made invisible or forced to communicate in an outrageous way, shouldn't he rediscover this deep vocation designated by Rothko? Even though Anne-Sarah Le Meur uses digital tools, now globalized, allowing an insane circulation of images instead of the possibility of saying or being, she takes us back to this experience of the aniconic veil (i.e.: without images). This veil, as a vibratory threshold, prohibits fusion and proclaims the empty interval (called by Rothko “the somewhere in between”). It proclaims the subject's resistance to the disturbing and hypnotic forces of the generalized communication and consumption of images. By the darkening of the reds and the undecidable opposition between purplish purple (TeKèleT) and crimson purple (ArGaMaN), this veil, reworked in a secular and immanent way by our artist, requires us to keep a contemplative and meditative distance from all the moral oppositions and, particularly those of the archaic figures of good and evil. This distance then allows the necessary suspense to act. Thus, Anne-Sarah Le Meur invites us to consider that the vocation of art is not to reflect the decisions of power. The philosopher Jacques Derrida regarded the experience of the veil of the temple as the possibility of sustaining in us the tension between veiling and secrecy. He even made it a determining state of the artistic act to separate it from the spectacle and the endless consumption of images, for the benefit of an experience of the interval that nothing comes to occupy: detachment of man from his reduction alienated from an exhaustion-consumer in the face of everything that exists, until there is nothing left: parched earth and technological devices that run empty… and nothing! Jean-Rodolphe Loth - June 2020 Art critic for Octopus, Artistic precision of words of mouth