Let’s Escape
Agnes Guillaume’s pieces all have one thing in common, their style: allusive, metaphorical, never realistic, but nevertheless connected to an existential reality. Each of Agnès Guillaume’s videos adds to a corpus of reflections on the fact of existence and thinking through life. Do we ever know if we have taken the right direction? How do we exist and on what? On love, adversity, resistance, letting go? On the fear and focus that our mortal fate brings to bear on our actions? On the imagination in which we take refuge?
The artist’s pieces are intended to generate a meditative state. Let’s Escape pushes this meditation into two different directions. An invitation to self-reflect through My Thoughts and My Nights and an invitation to escape reality through Minéralités.
Profoundly interrogating what it means to be human – the artist speaks for everyone, not primarily for herself – especially in terms of the psyche, and producing from this depth a poetic representation, an aesthetic: this is the declared meaning of the My’s series: My Nights, My Fears, My Thoughts, My Roots. These four titles belong to four videos, each about five minutes long. Created in this order between 2015 and 2018, the set is presented in the form of four thematically linked installations, each capable of being exhibited independently.
The exhibition starts with the video My Nights, in the video, Agnès Guillaume describes insomnia in a literal and concrete manner. The description is literal in that the background image on the screen is a full-frontal, close-up view of woman’s face, eyelids alternately shut or open wide. The description is concrete in that this image is a self-portrait. It is perhaps worth stressing that the decision to design My Nights as a video loop has heightened and channeled meaning. Loops abolish time. They have no start and no finish. They create a time of their own that cannot be real. Time, as usually understood, is linear. Crafting a loop immediately removes the viewer from elementary timing with its chronological beat, releasing her or him from time’s grid.
My Thoughts series consist of a video and a collection of various prints on Japanese paper set in a lightbox are shown in the exhibition. ‘‘What is thought, but also what goes beyond the rational course of a meditation?’’ are among the questions the artist presents through this works. They think about an internal space we are convened in, possibly an unresolved endoscopy.
Minéralités is a series of nine videos inspired by the famous Chinese “Dreamstones”. These stones representing weird and sometimes unknown shapes were collected throughout the Chinese empires to serve as an escape to a reality random or unfair. The shapes on the stones reminded the people of other meditative elements of nature: clouds in the sky, wind blowing through the glass… Similarly for her piece Minéralités, the artist sought a strong and powerful nature to represent which she found in Brittany, France. In Minéralités, water, sand, rocks, wind, light are all mixed with unrecognizable bodily forms to open the door into the meditation.
As an escape of the tangible and against any kind of certitude or single mindset, the exhibition is a call to come back to reality with a more open-mind, critical and personal gaze.
Quotes by Paul Ardenne, Art Historian and Writer