Madame rêve- Haude Bernabé
A group of sculptures and drawings created in 2020 and 2021.
Through waking or sleeping dreams, the blossoming of an art in search of escape
A journey that does not exist, except in the mind of the person who will be carried away by the work
"I know that there are islands, far to the south, and great cosmopolitan passions [...]".
"Whether there are gods or not, we are their slaves
Fernando Pessoa, "The Book of Intranquillity
This work was born out of the long period of confinement that we experienced, the space being restricted to the walls of the studio and the house. But it is by no means a "confinement diary", it is rather a testimony of a quest for salutary escape through waking or sleeping dreams.
The city that was closing in made me look for nature, I found it in books, memories, photos or past "harvests". And I tried to recreate it, for example by using dry leaves whose imprints colonised the space of the drawings, or by exploring ceramics. It was thus present around me and I could live in it. It was a way of building a small imaginary paradise, in a luxuriant, exuberant, warm, lively, talkative Nature of which man was only one of the elements. A Nature whose Gods had not been exiled to a celestial elsewhere and which regained its sacred power with the poetry that stretched its threads from one continent to another.
In this empty and mute time, a breach was also opened towards a sensitive universe of other presences in the world. Time, in a way, dissolved, leaving an empty space for the "absent", their voice became audible and the dreams full of their presence. Perhaps this is the only space that our Western societies leave them...
Strictly speaking, there is no intellectual approach in this work, at least in the sense of exploring a theme. It is in the continuity of the previous one, surely more focused on the feeling while leaving a beautiful part to the onirism, to the imagination. I propose to the viewer a journey that does not exist but in which he can be carried away.
The title is of course a reference to Alain Baschung's marvellous song, Eros, only less present...
Haude Bernabé
June 2021
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