One person

Support Act : La clé de champs is the title of an exhibition consisting in an installation of numerous works on the walls of the space, coloured lights placed discreetely in the ceiling and a performance. It has been inaugurated just before the pandemic. 

The space, if not the scene, is defined by the mixed colored zones in the ceiling, by several metallic bars screwed in the walls, and by plates of glass, painted and covered by silkscreen prints. These plates are gathered in small groups, forming some compositions with photographs and drawings, suggesting silent stories. There are also prints on paper: some brief texts oveprinted on existing printed material, often political leaflets, creating caustic encounters between different registers of language : proverbs, poems, and propaganda. The metallic bars are usually hidden within the walls of buildings, to structure and support them. But here they look like urban relics, amplifying an atmosphere of cold urbanity.

Every work functions with layers, plays on conceptual or physical depths. It combines ideas, images, emotions in a theatrical way. The early experience in the world of comics could be traced in these works, in the way narration is engaged, though experimentaly. Many works contain characters, looking like puppets stucked in labyrinthic cities, so huge that they look like David against Goliath. It is the world-city, squeezing weak forms of life, with its inhumane dimension, its dry materials (glass, metal, concrete), the divisions it creates, its digital and abstract conception. Human being seems to err, to wander with no purposes in a city that he paradoxically conceived himself. Other characters are lost in solitary situations, silences, blindness, difficulties to communicate with others.

During the performance, made during the opening, someone wears a mask from Pierrot, a mischievous and sad character of the Commedia dell’arte. This person is seated in the center of the room, he doesn’t speak, and stares at his computer, apparently excluded from every conversations around. But, actually, one could see that he is writing on his computer, in real time, several types of contents in different languages : pieces of conversations that he hears, answers that he gives to visitors trying to enter in contact with him, personnal monologs. These words are projected in real time on top of one of the wall of the exhibition, as an additional layer, over the works. The artist is both present and absent; he seems to mimick the different personnalities of his charachters appearing in the silkscreen compositions. He is a figure both identified and anonymous, solitary and collective, operating almost like a prism, or a wizard, or a jester, trying to engage a form of catharsis, in the middle of a confused mob.

The performance organised at the MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary art from Nice, by Claire Migraine and her association Thankyouforcoming, concludes a week of residence in the area, with meetings of the different persons active in the field of visual arts. It developps itself in three phases. The first is a presentation, half humoristic, half serious of the “theory of Asterix and Obelix”, a reference to the famous comic book created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo where stereotypes about cultural imaginaries are approached. It is an attempt to sketch the collective imaginaries of given regions, where many artists seem to work often in a similar direction. The second phase is a projection of prepared groups of images showing works created by artists coming from a common area: here, Belgium, France, and the Nice region. In the last phase maps of the collective imaginaries are spread on the floor with stamped words describing the collective imaginaries in question, and coloured ropes to represent loose frontiers. Everything happening in the middle of the museum rooms, full of artworks and imaginaries, echoing the maps on the floors. 

Photographs : Alexandre Ansel, Claire Migraine

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