...AU LIEU...

With Image Contact, Angèle Verret renews in the small room of Galerie B-312 the experience already tried in Montreal at the Centre des Arts Contemporains du Québec in Montreal in 2000-2001. This experience consisted in creating an in situ work according to a process already tested in the studio. Angèle Verret paints some of her paintings by letting the fluidity of the pigment-laden binder interact with the slightest variations in the surface of a prepared canvas placed horizontally. This operation is repeated until the artist finds the result disturbing enough to address it to us. In the case of Image Contact, the process is applied on the floor. The slightest floor accidents and the major axes of unevenness appear in the form of a trompe-l'oeil of a network of cracks which gives the whole the appearance of a stereoscopic photograph intended for a planimetric survey. But slight reflections of colour bring us back to reality. On the reasons that motivate her to proceed in this way, Angèle Verret is quite clear: "It is not a question of elucidating anything, but rather of [...] giving ourselves the means to see that there is indeed something to question in our way of living our relationship to reality, to what we believe it is, to what we want it to be and to what we find it essential to see. » Angèle Verret's work is a bit like a maxim addressed to us, the content of which we discover in the course of the experience, not so much of the image, but of the disorder into which this image does not fail to plunge our gaze. What is the reason for this confusion? -If in front of the artist's paintings it is possible to avoid the test of such a disorder by questioning the means that allowed the artist to obtain the unheard-of images that we know him, this escape is no longer possible in front of the works in situ. For it suffices to be a little attentive to the marks in the floor that extend beyond the edge of the image to understand immediately how this image was obtained. From then on, each fold of paint, which hides behind the semblance of an extraordinary trompe l'oeil, ceases to appear as a painted illusion and instead becomes a way of revealing the slightest depressions and eminences in the floor. Or, the floor thus painted, its roughness’s are not all the more visible; they remain invisible while being revealed, betrayed by the folds of paint. Image Contact is in a way the most rigorous work of an unveiling of the invisible, if one is willing to take the notion of unveiling in the most philosophical sense, that is to say in a sense that comes from an experience of the unveiled as from an experience of what has always been there, never having been hidden, but having been ignored simply because of a deliberate blindness. Experienced by Image Contact, it would be vain to oppose the invisible to the perceptible, but it would not be vain to question the veiling that such opposition never ceases to produce in those for whom, beyond the perceptible, there is nothing.

—Translation of a text by Jean-Émile Verdier