Vanessa Desclaux
Antoine Marchand
Emmanuelle Lequeux
 

Vanessa Desclaux, 2013

 

PINEAPPLE THREAT

 

« So what? » you might ask. Well, beyond the simple debate of classical versus modern, the question prompts us to consider dimension in the malicious (a malice without wickedness) works by Anne Brégeaut. So, are there two or three dimensions? A fourth might better suit the eccentric mental landscapes into which the artist dives inviting us to do so too. This new exhibition by Anne Brégeaut at the Semiose Gallery, called ‘The threat of the Pineapple’ juxtaposes a large number of fragments each with its own story and opens windows on imaginary worlds each one as frenzy as the other. Frenzy in the figurative sense, a magnificent obsession very aware of how close it is to sheer madness – the psychological or pathological kind. It represents distorted thought, a psychic disturbance, it is a deformed perception of reality. This is because Anne Brégeaut takes great care to deform and distort traditional forms of drawing and painting: she doesn’t paint on canvasses stretched over a chassis, but on wooden boards that she cuts out beforehand, following her own intuition, in order to give them totally baroque forms – a phrase used to describe the irregular shapes of pearls. On these boards, Anne Bégreaut brings out mysterious scenes: a Venetian gondola lost in the middle of an ocean (The Mirage), a character sporting a pineapple costume terrified by a giant kitten (Pineapple Threat), that becomes detached on swathes of patterns in glistening colours. These backgrounds created by Anne Brégeaut evoke either psychedelic landscapes or flowery wallpaper or the pictures behind comic strips made in the 1980s. The representation of houses is once more well positioned in this constellation of recent works. In the Small Green Vase, a house with blue walls and roof is perched on the edge of the painting as if on the edge of a precipice, giving the illusion of volume. Volume is present in this work but in the form of a shelf prolonging the painting at a right angle: it is the support of an elegant small green vase, placed in front of the picture, its form coming away from the black background decorated with large pink flowers of the painted wooden board. Brégeaut stirs up trouble when relating scale to traditional hierarchy. The work is made up of elements whose structure is completely illogical. Besides, Anne Brégeaut confesses to completely ignoring the rules of perspective, because she prefers a pictorial quality achieved thanks to the naďve and simplified forms she creates so as to indicate to the audience that this pictorial world does not conform to what it perceives as real but prefers to succumb to the desiring forces of dream, imagination and fiction. In that particular universe, the pictures have abandoned the well-structured frames of geometry and resemblance. The works have been pierced with holes that the artist has outlined with bright coloured plasticine in the House in the woods: mental blocks, unconscious gaps, key holes or the white rabbit hole in which Alice fell. The hole in a picture is an obscure area, yet another clue given by the artist to point out the disjointed nature of these short sto¬ries that keep on echoing like refrains when the visitor has left the exhibition.