Portraits of a Lady Opening night, rue Vernier. Having pushed wide open the doors of the Galerie Eva Vautier, you fall nose to nape onto a large-format…
Portraits of a Lady Opening night, rue Vernier. Having pushed wide open the doors of the Galerie Eva Vautier, you fall nose to nape onto a large-format photograph of Sandra Lecoq, seen from behind. In this photo, Sandra Lecoq, transfiguring her everyday life, has staged herself, turning her studio rags into an immense patched and soiled wedding dress: the bride is in a mess. She is a kind of tall pole, a caryatid in the throes of a growth spurt, an Alice in Wonderland of trouble filling the space from top to bottom. If you lifted her petticoat, you would find her, the clever little thing, perched on top of a pile of paint modules borrowed from a 2016 photo: Haut les cœurs et bas de plafond, of which Peau d’âme is a kind of inverted double. Exhibition view, Autoportrait des autres en noir, Sandra D. Lecoq, June 2017, Photo © François Fernandez. Portraits of a Lady Opening night, rue Vernier. Having pushed wide open the doors of the Galerie Eva Vautier, you fall nose to nape onto a large-format photograph of Sandra Lecoq, seen from behind. In this photo, Sandra Lecoq, transfiguring her everyday life, has staged herself, turning her studio rags into an immense patched and soiled wedding dress: the bride is in a mess. She is a kind of tall pole, a caryatid in the throes of a growth spurt, an Alice in Wonderland of trouble filling the space from top to bottom. If you lifted her petticoat, you would find her, the clever little thing, perched on top of a pile of paint modules borrowed from a 2016 photo: Haut les cœurs et bas de plafond, of which Peau d’âme is a kind of inverted double. In the 2016 photo used for the group exhibition curated by Karim Ghelloussi, Le monde ou rien, she appeared in an apron, disappearing beneath a pyramid of multicoloured, balancing bricks. The girl in the blue overalls is her; the fairground doll in the crinoline is her too. Worker or queen, crushed or dominating the situation, Sandra Lecoq has for over twenty years been married to her dirty art (dress = rag, painting = palette). In both photos, the ballroom is the humble tiled rectangle of her studio, her luxury, she says: a mise en abyme within a building where work gets done, a cell like a classroom where every day one unlearns. It is not the space that is too low-ceilinged but the task that is immense; it is not against the walls that she bumps but against something else. If, for the length of a snapshot or two, Sandra Lecoq half-opens her workshop, it is not to give away her secrets or to bear witness, since her work has no documentary aim, but rather to show the bond that links her to a group of artists, studio neighbours, friends and travelling companions, a small community of spirit, a band of musketeer-artists. Florent Mattei takes the photo for Sandra Lecoq, Karim Ghelloussi exhibits it, and so on: one for all, all for one. This participatory and complicit economy gave birth in particular to this photograph, Peau d’âme and avanti jaddu! (the rooster in…
