The exhibition L’Ecart (The Gap), created by Magali Brénon and Nicolas Tourre, ran from October 15 through November 15, 2009.
Galerie Incognito
16 Rue Guénégaud 75006 Paris, France
http://incognito.vu/artiste.php
Nicolas Tourre and Magali Brénon live and work in Paris. During the workshop in 2008, Nicolas Tourre created a landscape piece in response to a letter written by Magali Brénon. The letter was hidden in the drawings on the floor. They wanted to follow their creative relation and this exhibition last month was the way they did it.
The following is the letter written by Magali Brénon:
I am the vessel of one’s work. I am a thing of curiosity.
I am the lake that broke open where an eruptive fissure happened upon a stream. I was born of the fall of groundwater onto melting rocks. The explosion chamber is where I flowed – I sank and saw the circular collapse of the crystalline basement where I lay. Phreatomagmatic eruption. Expressed here: an ephemeral plume; a torn surface. My body now molds the point of contact – a depression in the land, and several acres wide, is a token of the blast of an encounter.
I am dormant water – fated to disappear? I am water stagnating, vulnerable and shallow, in the winter solid entirely – varying. I thicken, opacify, lose sight.
How do I choose what happens to me? An ice shelf snapping or the slings of the wind? To opt for the rupture and the sudden gap. For icebergs and sunken recesses. To choose fracture, perchance fragmentation. And then to dwindle, melt; vanish. Erased, the roads and elevations, faded the sources. The landscape is suppressed.
Listening to the illusive silences that inhabits my house; giving substance to my ghosts. Broaching rooms that harbor splendors and atrocities. Loosen, untie, untangle, unweave the bonds invented. Open a gash in models, archetypes and copies – chop beliefs, crack images, capsize ideas, cleave blocks, lay waste on the common place, leave no ground unturned, fall apart, a ruin.
On the battlefield I empty my pockets and I descend into the waters. Lava flowing underneath radiates heat. Surrounding me are undomesticated thoughts.
My impropriety is unforgivable – the missteps, the bends in the rules…
I jettison. I empty my pockets, I throw my thoughts into the water. There they will steep. No staying voiceless in the quenching of a scarlet slumber.
I relax. In the warm breeze something gives. I listen to what echoes in the unconfined, in the space open and offered, air and grass, lakes and waterfalls and secret brooks. I listen to murmurs. Of being out of the water I will not die; I am alive. How do I defeat what remains that resists?
I belong in the wild. I will go meet it. I’ll abuse the substance of words to the point of nonsense. Who am I? I walk in the woods and am disoriented but I am not afraid. I enter the distance, the possibility of a mistake and, in the gap, I search. The triangle is not closed; shatters make its style. Originally, there is nothing original. I look for a view. I wish a viewpoint. I explore what separates, what falls, I search the elusive, the effusive, the refuse and the unbeknownst. I will take my pick in what has lapsed. I will rummage the openings, part the edges and look deep.
Taut as a bow I now face the reserve.
To go beyond the confined body, to escape through the net? To cross the valleys on the surface, to swim above the engulfed towns? On this lake of artifice, who is stringing me along?
Release.
Time, on more than one level.
Come magma or high water, I let go. I have more than one (vocal) cord to my bow.
Magali Brénon
Translation: Xavier Blandin
