Emmanuelle Lequeux, 2010

It is difficult not to wonder who might have bent over Anne Brégeaut’s cradle and prompted her to come up with
these enigmatic fairy tales anchored in reality. Which mischievous godmother paved the way towards this literature
for children, who have grown up too quickly, or adults, who long to return to their childhood in order to forget
everything as quickly as possible? Brégeaut’s compositions include many of the elements of the fairy tale: a sense of
foreboding, deep, dark forests, giant beds, tiny log cabins, carnivorous plants and gluttonous cakes. Her world appropriates
everyday raw materials and objects and transforms them into dreams or even nightmares. Bricks, wood,
a toy or a text… A wave of her magic wand and a micro-fiction appears. These humble tales however, do not lead
us by the hand in order to impose their unease on the spectator. They seem to have been captured at a moment
when a soft breeze is causing them to flutter slightly, imperceptibly destabilising them, adding a touch of suspense.
Reality however, is often unyielding. Yet Anne Brégeaut is a master conjurer: she knows precisely how to extract
its essence and deliver its soul. At first glance, everything in her work is immediately recognisable. It is as if small
portions of our everyday existence had infiltrated the exhibition. This reality is however haunted by a disquieting
strangeness, which makes her work quite remarkable. A beach, a series of pumpkins, a hangman’s noose, a porcelain
cup… All quite familiar yet somehow even more disconcerting in their familiarity. These objects seem to have
no obvious relationship with each other, neither in their interpretation nor their scale. It is up to the spectator to invent
his or her own narrative, like finding the solution to a puzzle. Such is the case with her wall painting inspired
by the Lacan test – This famous psychoanalyst would recite a story to his patients, in which each character represented
a different value such as love, morality, work and family. At the end of the tale, the patients would be asked
to choose their preferred character. The artist has transformed this idea into vast pink dreamscape, through which
a river rippled by doubt slowly flows. We are given no clues as to what the different silhouettes represent. They are
simply destined to wander in the mind of the spectator until he comes up with his own little saga. Here there is no
question of archetypal figures or over-interpretation; thousands of stories have been brought together as one and
not one of them is conclusive. Anne Brégeault has occassionally worked in a similar way with her friends: she tells
them a story and they in turn describe how they see the different characters and objects. From these descriptions,
she produces her own painted version, a kind of double self-portrait, where everything has become blurred and
takes on a multitude of meanings.
In her work, there are neither grandiloquent heroes nor exciting twists in the tail. It has nothing to do with Snow-
White or Cinderella: her princesses wear schoolgirls’ skirts and the monsters never put in an appearance. Somehow
they remain on our side of the paper or have been left behind somewhere after the end credits of the cartoon. The
same thing is true for pain. In Anne Brégeaut’s work, pain is never self-evident. It hides in one of the dead ends of
a labyrinth, dressed in girlish pink. Yet pain is always implicitly present or rather the apprehension of pain… Pain
from not knowing how to love, from seeing ones loved one drifting away, from perceiving ones life as nothing more
than a memory and watching the present fly by. Like the couple of clowns in love, walking along the seashore,
watching the sun set over the ocean. The sun however, never disappears and the couple never moves forward: they
all seem to be stuck in an eternal loop in the magic of the present, which is both burlesque and heartrendingly sad.
Around a decade ago, when Anne Brégeaut was starting out, her work resembled an intimate diary that refused
to deliver its secrets. Her style of drawing was humble and often included seemingly anodyne phrases in which
anyone might project their own, everyday despair… weaknesses within a couple, a paradoxical desire for solitude,
the poetry of expectation. It was about both everything and nothing at the same time. Minimalist tragedies, litanies
to self-effacement, wall paintings, where self-doubt rings out… it was filled with that which is not meant to be
shared, which we can only imagine others feeling, if at all. Her work revealed the autism in each and every one of
us, which transforms words into the heaviest of silences. One of her more monumental pieces uses the exclamation
“Ohé” (hey!). The word rings hollow. It is a vain attempt to get closer to someone else. It sounds flat. Is that all we
can come up with? Is that all our immense knowledge can put at our disposition in order not to be so alone? Anne
Brégeaut’s work frequently makes use of this type of phatic expression in language: those almost meaningless
words or expressions we use to perform a social task in creating a link between two beings. Language is however,
little by little, finding a new place in her work. Whereas before it regularly put in an appearance as a kind of gaunt,
jagged, disjointed anti-hero, today its use has become more discreet. According to the artist: “I construct a piece of
work by treating each section of the image like a separate word within a text, but without these words taking on a specific meaning, so that they remain somewhat evanescent.”
Today, Anne Brégeaut’s work has gained in both emotion and scale. Yet she continues to explore the unspoken,
the fissures and cracks… like Haiku, this form of poetry “which we understand implicitly on one level, but which
refuses to fully reveal its full enigmatic meaning.” Where what is said slips through the interstices between the
words, which themselves are too fallible. Her work leads us to the edge of the precipice then lets go of our hand, to
leave us dizzy with vertigo or fascinated by the microcosm of nothingness before us. Her current work preserves
the delicacy without preciousness of its earlier incarnations. She has retained the capacity to create a “lacy” vision
of the world, while avoiding the titillation of something too embroidered. Her present-day work often takes the
form of installations, a natural development from the small objects that she used to place on shelves: a broken cup
glued back together, “a glass full of air”. The increase in scale is in no way a rupture from her earlier work – “I see
them as the continuity of my smaller canvasses. I have just tried to lend them a more three-dimensional reality”,
she explains. If Anne Brégeaut decides to show some painted wood, she paints an illusion of painted wood over it,
in order to remain “within the image”. Such is the case with the slightly ridiculous labyrinth, which wouldn’t even
frighten a child and within which it would be quite impossible to lose oneself. Its base, according to the artist “is
a little like the space of a painting – it raises the work like a dream, it gives the impression of something floating in
the air.”
Images of a floating world – this is how ukiyo-e is translated - the Japanese engravings from the Edo period, staged
in kabuki theatre, showing the carefree lives of courtesans or demons. This term could easily apply to Anne Brégeaut’s
universe, which resembles a cousin of those “clouds, those marvellous clouds”. More than ever before, the
artist “places time within space”. Her work is a kind of refuge from the absurdity of our world, while portraying it
within mental spaces, which seem to ask nothing more than to be personified. Paradoxically gaining in clarity. For
all of this might well look like a series of candies. But these are those pepper candies, whose taste remains in the
mouth long after swallowing.
translation: Chris Atkinson