Collective Memory
Following the closure of the Unimétal Normandie (SMN) steelworks in 1993, the infernal cycle of sound and light from the factory came to an abrupt halt. Élisabeth Leverrier created a video, "SMN Portes ouvertes" (SMN Open Doors), which is both a testimony and a documentary, "before the painful silence of the unsaid turns into general amnesia."
Through her performances, the artist, as Jeanne Verdun tells us in the book A fresco, seeks to "capture the waves of energy that emanate from certain places in order to transfer them onto the surface, which becomes covered with traces, lines, and signs. The gesture revives something that has disappeared."
Élisabeth Leverrier draws using burnt wood. Her "A fresco" technique is a specific method of mural painting that is done on plaster before it is dry.
E. Leverrier: "Drawing is like a graphic memory of the place, a restitution of its sonority."
The choice of the ephemeral?
What remains of the artistic process? This is reminiscent of the Paris Biennale's choice to address the subject in one of its symposiums, "These people undoubtedly confuse process with emptiness."
The artist is interested in the construction of mental images. Her drawings are the result of verbal constraints used to reach the picture rails and move around. The lines bear witness to the tension of the body.
E. Leverrier: "This abrupt halt to the act of painting provokes the emergence of memories, like an uninterrupted flow of words, a sonorous bubbling. How can this sonority be made visible?"
The final result is refined: black marks on a white background. The fire lit by Élisabeth Leverrier is extinguished. Jeanne Verdun writes, "Abstract art, therefore, but which does not ignore the space that gave birth to it; nor the gesture that gave birth to it."
Art & Contemplation
In the face of the overload of images and the hyperactivity offered by the media: does art allow for a pause? To clear one's mind?
Élisabeth Leverrier's lines invite contemplation. Her aim is to reach a state of consciousness "where the world is whole, where a quiet and fabulous energy unfolds. There. To arrive at nothingness and receive the world."
Axelle Anne
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