ÉTATS D’HERBE

Do you draw grass? … It is not really a current grass… One believes to see like that, there is nothing to see and finally one sees things which one did not see… It always occurs something when you look at well, it is necessary to know to look at, it is necessary to wait.

L’HERBE EN ETAT DE VIGILANCE
It is the nature of the glance which makes the event. It is its intensity and its link to the topic which generates the outcome of this one. And if by inviting us to scan grass, it were us whom the artist observed?
To emit the postulate that Nandre crosses a macrofigurative phase does not belong to one of these writing processes which make it possible to get rid of the cumbersome burden of conceptual or abstract labelling. It would then be enough to identify any mode of expression characterized by the absence of reference, like an enlargement effect of a whole part, to make conspicuous its hermetic banality.
One could thus objectify any type of representation. In this case, no need to resort to this process. The artist does not seek to scramble the tracks. She gives herself the keys of her work: “States of Grass”. A plural multiplying a singular. A unicity in its infinite.
Vegetable variations which do not seek to recognize and name the subject for its characteristics. The grass is seized in a generic acceptance. The man apprehends it while being a surface. It’s about a multiple, an indissociable allowed whole. Except making of it a subject of study who allows the detail to escape to its undifferentiated condition, to its anonymity, to state its properties.
No, what fascinates the plastician to the point to make us share a kind of staggered state, it’s the observation of this absence of status that the herbalist grants to it, for example. Nandre insulates a perimeter which she subjects to our sagacity, as she would take a square of crowd, a band of clouds, or any dimension defined, liquid, mineral, or gas, in order to enjoin us to focus our attention on these spaces whose prolonged everyday life imperceptibly exhausted any interest.
Her intention would be to awake the glance, to put it in a state of vigilance; to some extent to redeem this guilty indifference, this cold ignorance maintained with regard to this component of our landscape; better, of this other part of ourselves which receives our steps, marries our body of which it collected the in love print, and nourish our glance.
If the object of her investigations finds itself renewed, Nandre remains nevertheless faithful to an aesthetic of the isochromy which she maintains in her relationship to the subject and its treatment. The white, in its lilial candour, installs her in a posture of icon, confining with quasi holiness.
There, the matter sees itself defined twice, not without a certain disturbance. Through the transparency and at the same time lactescent opacity. In a light thickness relationship. The matter seems to fluctuate between the thin of its composition and the insistence of its contents which however remain prohibited to our understanding.
As if its significance remained without final object. As if the grass, by its only presence, justified its reason of being. To show us retinal persistence as much that the permanence of the memory or the insistence of undisclosable as much as obscure attachment. The grass pushes inside us, penetrates our intimate being, grows and multiplies. “To cut grass under the feet”, it grows again inside the flesh.
To prove it, Nandre lets saunter a whole impudic theory of these forelimbs, convinced, unbeknownst by us, of their disconcerting vegetable intimacy. She invites us to scan some at some most close tactless anonymity by the means of inprisonment in the “Boxes of vigilance”.
With final, “States of grass” does not solve anything of the mystery of our affinities to the plant. By stating it, while trying to specify its nature, that darkens it more and returns curiously to us essential, inevitable.