LES LUNAISONS

We all speak about time: before, after, often, sometimes, always.
We flee and seek its limits.
However, we have the useless wish to preserve particular moments and we remain confused and dubitative facing eternity and timelessness.
The work “Lunaisons” seeks to be to be a time allegory : irreversibility, past, future, immediateness

LES LUNAISONS
Nandre traces back and descends time, traverses , retains , questions it. Let it slip away too. Escape. In her immaculate studio in La Roche Noire , on the heights of Clermont-Ferrand, time however appears to flee. The site of her work of paintings, columns and glass pots . In the murmur, the rustle, often the breath. Here, one retains his breathing for better swimming. To let itself carry by the river. Because the life becomes fragile and the subtle emotion, invaluable in the surrounding etheral wedding atmosphere. Here, “silence is so large, where the wind starts, where the words of the language arise… One is there, only completely, in the substance of the air, as one is light!” writing J.M.G. Clézio.
No wanderings, no drift, therefore. In its large iridescent paintings, only impatience, waiting, the absence, slowness… On bleached boards, Nandre scratches, brushes against, tickle some old strengthened tablecloths of hotel and plays of the palimpsest. In immaculate intoxication, the alchemist exasperates the matter, multiplies the coats of paint, leaves reserves. Her hand trails with idleness or trace in the urgency. Words appear. At the right place, up and down… No matter! Often “temporary”, “boredom”, “nostalgia” appears in the grain,the draft. Often, she counts the days like the prisoners, the hours like the schoolboys. With aligned sticks, plumes of hatchings, small ruffled papers or pieces of cords. In the fading of lacteous paintings, that vibrates, hustled and squabbles. This yields like the reeds under the wind. This is printed like the pressure of a bird’s wing. The magician juggles the rites and the magic spells. She doesn’t insist. Doesn’t affirm. Patiently, she makes and demolishes, builds and unbuilds. Disturbance of the codes. Jammings. The eye is lost without the diaphanous purity and it likes that. Because Nandre seduces and courts. Always in the confidence. The secrecy. Remain “to be and to appear, the unvoiced comment”, like she often notes in small books. Remain the signs, the rhythms, the impulses, the emotions which one does not cease traversing with the eyes and the lips. Thus, between the pleasure and tiredness in love, Nandre makes visible time, the wavering of time. And makes unclassable fabrics “by an inimitable trace, the inscription and obliteration, childhood and the culture, the drift and the invention”, as writes Roland Barthes in connection with Twombly that she venerates.
But worse still. Nandre imprisons the moments in invaluable columns of organza and collects the a-temporal in glass pots filled with water. Because in her workshop-laboratory, she also “fiddles”, as she likes to say, some incredible sculptures light, ludic and dancing. Always on the razor’s edge. Always at the borderline before falling, in weightlessness. Swaying casually to the slightest motion. To the merest passing. With the slightest surprise. Thus, “the Weight of the years” reveals tiny mirrors, pebbles and bones, which hold together by an unknown miracle of nylon wire. “The lapse of memory” reveals optical glasses of different corrections which offer the increased vision of words and bits of words graved on round and limpid forms. “The walk of time” presents a throng of very small feet suspended to long and fine ribbons of organdi. Or “the Urgency” shows again tens of tiny fellows, cut out in a fast blow of scissors, holding hands, trying to climb an infinite spiral. Everywhere, the thorny shredded mesh and the unctuous tarlatan, the irisation of the scraped fabric squares, the transparency of the laboratory pipes and the silk of feathers celebrate in volumes, how much vaporous, the weddings of the present, the past, the future, the instant… In a spider game of lace and knitting, of invention and perfection of the materials, accomodated, collected, that one finds in her poetic pots of glass. There, nothing moves anymore. That’s the rule of “timelessness”, explains the manipulative wirzardry. Motionless, floating on the surface of water and absorbed in depths, a bride drowns in too much love, hands cling to buoys, pearls play with their reflections while one of them seeks its breathing…
With the assistance of air, of water, of moon between fluid and mineral, the artist gives a new life to materials and touches with her dazzled fingers “the number of the movement” about which Aristote talks. She also calls, in the so white extenuation of her haloed work, “the idle period of space and covered with flowers, and with the perfume of the flowers, and with the time of the names of the flowers”, which Fernando Pessoa evokes. Nandre kisses the memory and embraces eternity. The feeric space of Lunations.

- Text by Anne Kerner -

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