ALICE ET LES INTRIGANTS

ANNE EMERY
paintings
January 22 – February 26, 2022

Among the pictorial encounters that have marked Anne Emery’s career, one of the most significant took place in the bathroom of a small apartment near Place Pigalle. A veduta fixed on a Lucarne (dormer window) above the bathtub gives a view of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. This section of wood creates an imaginary passage between Paris and Venice, or between “the bathroom and the world “, as Pierre Wat will write in the catalog of an exhibition devoted to the supposed author of the painting: Albert Marquet.

More than an anecdote, this story inspires Anne Emery to create a triptych presented in the exhibition and gives entry to all of her work. Through the window of Marquet, the painting of Anne Emery speaks to the eye. His canvases open onto a pictorial world beyond the frame defined by the support. The forms go beyond the canvas and emancipate themselves from the painting; such detail broadens elsewhere into the main topic of the composition; the painting in the painting puts the gaze in abyss. The pictorial vocabulary unfolds from canvas to canvas, like so many sentences varying the same theme, and the color, finally, spreads out to bathe this other world that the artist tames.

Anne Emery juggles with her “intriguers”, funny colored spheres, and has fun. She plays with oppositions and complementarities: the abstract and the figurative, the perspective and the areas, the history of painting. Thus populated, space opens up into an elastic world to explore. Like Alice, the spectator crosses the canvas, reassured by the figures who have already invested in it and accompanied by the “intriguers”, to stroll in this world of acid blooms where flowers happily coexist with warm snowflakes.

“There is an Albert Marquet in the bathroom”, Anne Emery tells us in pop colors and intriguing stickers. A playful and graceful way, mosaic and diffracted, to keep the commitment deep from the first of the moderns: “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you” (Cézanne). But since nature likes to hide, you need a kaleidoscope and an Alice with pink hair to play with the real one, hide and seek, on the other side of the mirror. Or rather take us by the hand to go bathe in these waters and slide, from canvas to canvas, to the trunk and the wall by this pretty Lucarne of random.