27 September to 6 November 2014 AINSI SOIT-IL. Jacqueline Gainon and Frédérique Nalbandian Jacqueline Gainon.
27 September to 6 November 2014 AINSI SOIT-IL. Jacqueline Gainon and Frédérique Nalbandian Jacqueline Gainon. Exhibition from 26 September to 6 November This exhibition by Jacqueline Gainon, in the space of the Galerie Eva Vautier, is built around the dilemma between image and painting, between memory and fantasy, between good manners and forbidden games. Under the sign of colour, two series of large blue and red paintings confront each other in diametrically opposed registers. Executed in an almost polished naïve style, the blue series draws on the artist’s childhood memories: it rests on a free interpretation of photographs of mountain outings taken from a family album. The original images, taken by the artist’s father in the Nice hinterland, are here subjected to a series of plastic operations. Their transposition into a monumental format, the move from black and white to colour and from the smooth rendering of the photograph to painterly materiality, gives them an undeniable sumptuousness. Finally, everything that belonged to the landscape is replaced by a pastel blue background that recalls the wallpaper of a child’s bedroom more than a summer sky. The picturesque elements still present in the first versions of the series — panoramas, rocky peaks or calvaries — have vanished, leaving room for a space/time as abstract as it is timeless. Between devotional image and bad dream, these paintings present strange, incredibly peaceful portraits in which the artist, still a little girl, and the members of her family stand upright against one another in a kind of half-sleep. Their eyes are closed, and when they are open they seem definitively absent, as if each were looking inside himself or herself, unaware of the presence of the others. Sometimes their heads droop to one side or their faces fade away, while their bodies seem to float in this blue expanse. Their wan complexion leaves the worst to the imagination. If the strangeness of the scene lies in this collective dozing on their feet, it is offset by the gestures of tenderness of this father and this mother towards their four children. There is something touching here, something still vibrant, that suggests a happy ending. The mind enjoys imagining this ideal family, very much alive, eyes open to the photographic lens, for these images have something universal about them: they could just as well be our own. But here the optic is replaced by the artist’s gaze, which clearly treats her childhood memories in a psychoanalytic way through the operations of displacement she imposes on them. Thus these fragments of the past resurface like moments lost for ever, as if the artist could not restore the joyful temporality of her childhood but set against it an eternal rest. Photographic evidence gives way to the opacity of painting, with its lumpy and tormented materiality. With tenderness and humour, Jacqueline Gainon distorts the idea of a family happiness all the more obsolete for having fallen apart,…
