"Speaking without making sounds is stronger than words because words tell lies. When you express yourself with gestures, you are simply witnessing the moment." The words of choreographer Carolyn Carlson resonate with a particular echo at the heart of this exhibition through their proximity to the creative process of the artists presented: primacy of gesture over words, physical experience, distrust of language, intensity of the moment...
From the selection of some forty works mixing young creation with historical artists, the exhibition Sillages seeks to unravel the issues specific to the act of creation. Favoring a sensitive approach to the works, the tour maintains a distance from an artistic context that would tend to value more what is said than what is shown. On the surface of these works, the gesture alone makes sense, far from any other form of discourse. Looking back over the surfaces he has crossed allows us to trace the creative process, as we would trace the wake left by a boat after its passage. It is a glimpse of the turbulence that agitated the process, the doubts about the directions taken, the changes of course – anticipated or not – the points of no return reached by the gesture of too much…
If the selection focuses on what we will call for convenience abstract works, it is to better reveal the presence of the gesture, freed from the seductive trappings of the figure. Laid bare, the gesture expresses itself, in a great magnitude (Gérard Traquandi), emerges like a flash of lightning (Alain Sicard), accompanies the work of color (Hélène Valentin), gives itself over in a close relationship to writing (Anne-Marie Schneider)… Varying its charge, its intensity, its incidences on the support, each artist patiently develops his own language to grasp the material and accompany its transformations. It is then, in the intimacy of the workshop, an adventurous conquest, an "odyssey" to use the words of Armelle de Sainte-Marie during which the pure pleasure of the gesture prevails.