AUBE ELLÉOUËT: COLLAGES

galerie 1900-2000, 8 rue Bonaparte, Paris VI. September 12 – October 13, 2012

Aube Elléouët's universe borrows an intimate language that is not strange to us. A certain familiarity is created for those who have read Fantômas, followed Alice's steps, Robert Houdin's gestures, the adventurers of Méliès and Jules Verne. Those who read André Breton and his peers, who frequent Sirens and Mages detect, in the constellated rhythm of her tides, private myths grafted onto Mythologies. Aube does not create images, but finds, borrows, diverts, cuts out forms, outlines them, glues them and composes a new polychromy. Second image, unprecedented, which assembles the pieces like a puzzle inventing itself according to the process. Ready-made these findings, often banal, already printed. The intervention is made at the level of choice of elements, in the rhapsodic exercise that mends, glues and patches. The waiting hollows out, empties the figure to come, the encounter will fill the vacant space by incorporating it into the whole. If collage metamorphoses the data, imagination here has the authority to change the world.

The meticulous adjustment of forms and colors unifies the vision in the continuum that the poetry of night affirms. Collagist since the 1970s, following Prévert, Max Ernst and other imagemakers, Aube Elléouët returns the image to the imaginary. In a saturated world where the omnipresent image preempts imagination and the imposition of the tangible, Aube liberates creativity. If the figures are glued edge to edge, without trace or interstice, the reading space remains open.

Beating, mixing elements, Aube reconfigures myths. The marine universe and Breton mysteries inspire her, as well as celestial objects and influences, a faithful bestiary, games, magicians and mediums, cities and geographical maps. Heroes of novels and legends, from the big screen (Citizen Kane, Sleepy Hollow), accompany her literary homages, her borrowings from the art world. She also refers to events (through the detour of the title often): Homages to Talisma Nasreen I, II, to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The image gains relief by including pieces of reality: mirrors, mother-of-pearl, buttons, postcards, lace, moiré, glass beads, tickets, bark, fabrics, leaves, accordion keys, blinking lamps, insects, shells, playing cards, atlas fragments, photos... These materials add their part to the hybrid character of collage.

The findings work in reverie. They assemble in silence – in the intervals of collage, then merge automatically into a vision where playful spirit and humor preside.

Nothing disturbing in this world that has its inclusive logic – condensation, contiguity, continuity, metamorphosis, metaphor. In this combinatorics born from the intervention of chance and the memory of forms, everything adds up to evoke the unexpected, the unusual, inventiveness and poetic mystery.

From visual borrowings, license is permitted vis-à-vis the representation of the real: objects taken out of context engender new compossibles. Analogy redistributes the givens. Scales and proportions have changed, high and low permute in non-hierarchy. Earth is a blue die. The new is born from an impression of déjà-vu. But the horizon is maintained, the frontal gaze (except in Géode(s): a telescopic image at 360° rising toward the obscure clarity of the interior sky). Kingdoms interpenetrate, coalesce with the human world and its objects, its machines. Environments are interchangeable, chaos ordered. There is only one living, continuous world (the one where charm operates). The eye undulates over simultaneity, glides from one element to another, creates connections. The back-and-forth weaves its own path, traces its trajectory to dream. The thread-gaze connects at will, relaunches a narrative course, weaves its own story. Signs, motifs orient, guide the game: it is Fantômas's ubiquity, the insistence of stars and cards (of destiny?), the multiple hands (by which the artist leads us). They become revenants between the plates. Thus from one to another, the eye remembers and experiences by ricochet the pleasure of reunions: reminiscences of another collage, of a quote from Breton, from Desnos, of a reproduced canvas... The repetition in another configuration (like the letters of an alphabet, the pieces of a game otherwise distributed, sometimes turned over, inverted, changed in size) affirms the same and the other. These leitmotifs bring memory and complicity into play. The sequence of plates is read and meditated one by one like a Liber mutis. Junctions and conjunctions making appear disappear raise the ontological question that makes us identify, re-identify perennial and mutated realities. But each collage is unique. Each plate composes an autonomous world although between them are created relationships, recalls – memories. Aube makes us set sail toward other surreal and serial logics where underlying sympathies and harmony reign, tangent to the world.

From the reuse of figures emerge new accords in the oneiric matter and plane space. A stained glass or magic lantern fairyland emerges from black. And where the night of the background constellates its fiction, a certain something, an aura of illumination fits its secrets.

The title, enigmatic, also increases meaning or contradicts the image. Slope of uncertainty and enchantment, inscriptions and graphemes also play with words. Titles and notations mislead, complete, overflow the tableau. Enigma (not to be solved), the indication amplifies the image as the night of the background transfigures values. From word to thing, between motifs, between plates, mystery crossbreeds. Reason lets go to let itself be surprised, amazed by the illumination of a meaning, the reverberation of another readability.

For these plates convoke in several senses appointments with creative imagination. The collage of ideas, forms, languages escapes any (univocal) interpretation for a plural logic, where fusions and telescopings are enriched by each one's intimate meaning. Each one referring to their own vision participates in collective creation. Collage thus increases infinitely...

This world holds by justness. Collage or art of jointure, it favors the encounter of signs that call to each other, suit each other. The plate is a place of surreal weddings. Intimate, Aube's visual vocabulary shares with her readers, among themselves, the taste for the marvelous. In the vision that each one appropriates, Aube plays with shared memories, for a poetry made and shared by all. From one image to another is created a game of mirrors, echoes, references. Leitmotifs and citations create punctuation; the continuity of collages arousing a capacity for memory, connivance. For they relay other alliances – from her predecessors, magicians of the scissors, to those who have become co-authors. Thus is written, apart from oneself, polyphonic, transfinite, a Never-ending Story.

In her domains of creativity - collages, postal art, boxes, surrealist objects, poems and even film production, Aube Elléouët reveals the link between beings (Secret Links, Lighthouse Echo), what circulates from work to life, what is transmitted. Between childhood and present, between surrealism and the poetry of daily life, there communicate, living networks, remembering and remembrance.