Fécamp
The pebbles are monsters
caressed by hands
little children last grinding
of visible matter they strike
in the hollow of city calves.
At the Estacades the circus stilts
plunge into the salt their total theater
and show their underside
of Roman roads under the sea

Marie-Christine Brière, Cœur passager, Éditions Librairie-Galerie Racine, 2013, p. 52.

The work by Françoise Armengaud and Françoise Py entitled Marie-Christine Brière et les galets de Fécamp. Une passion de poète et de peintre is devoted to a secret plastic work by their poet friend Marie-Christine Brière*. It consists of four school-format notebooks in which, from 2004 to 2008, she represented in watercolor and gouache several hundred stones that she had collected on the beaches, in Fécamp, thus saving them from oblivion. This serial artistic approach belongs, for the two authors, to the same obstinate passion that André Breton, agate seeker, or Roger Caillois, mineral discoverer, had manifested. For both of them, it was a matter of detecting the mysteries and hidden beauty in stone. Marie-Christine Brière has this particularity in her approach that she voluntarily chooses to stop only at the most humble and least worthy of interest stones, apparently. This is to better reveal their incredible capacity to amaze us, as Françoise Py notes: "this quest for stones could well be an alchemical quest and the demanding discipline that consists of painting them day after day, an operation of transmutation."

Marie-Christine Brière's notebooks show, life-size, stones without apparent curiosity, banal pebbles. These are not the regularly rounded pebbles described by Francis Ponge 1. Nor the precious or remarkable stones of Roger Caillois 2. These fragments torn from the cliff have been crushed, rolled, rubbed by the sea, sand and wind. The naturalist eye explores their chaotic surface. The watercolor plays with the iridescences that opal and chalcedony confer on flint. Each bears the stigmata of shocks, the chemical trace of its biogenesis. The accident participates in their poetry.

Marie-Christine Brière does not project imaginary forms onto her finds. She does not see any unusual sign in them, does not attribute magical or talismanic powers to them. No secret message that enlightens us about who we are. Attentive to the visible, she expresses herself as a painter, gives to see. Behind the gray, the inert, she reveals a body that resists 3. But also an incandescent palette, as Françoise Py emphasizes: "these inert and naked pebbles reveal, under the apparent grayness, browns, ochers, violets, oranges, grayed greens, emeralds, pinks, purples, pale lemons."

Poetry, today, reconnects with the sensible. Meditation of the world as totality and as meaning, it participates in rebuilding a world that holds (itself), in recreating an alliance beyond tensions after the ordeal of chaos, nonsense, paradise lost. This writer's painting takes the side of the inanimate, of silence, opposing shadow to sidereal whiteness, the intensity of the full to the void. From beach to page, an isolated presence confronts the infinite. A humble pebble crystallizes the place of a possible relationship.

Obstinate quest, the design of this art "of little" is to metamorphose the real. This exercise, which can be qualified as "spiritual," confronts the naked, inert thing with art, with poetry and thus sharpens our capacity for empathy. Each pebble is individuated, its image preserved. As for the poet Yves Bonnefoy, the stone, erected there, comes to conjure death, counter absence.

Every seizure is advent. Such an elected flint is extirpated from anonymity. Distinct object, the mineral offers a variety of the same. The variation of the motif illustrates the infinite that resides, according to Yves Bonnefoy, "in the radiance of the one not in the multiplicity of number." The poet begins with this fragment of here-below a questioning. Her tacit communion with the mineral shares with us reunions with a world lost sight of since childhood. Her gaze transfigures banality into encounter. It changes and charges it with clarity, beauty, poetry.

Meditating on stone reveals what it hides. The complex lies in the simple. Isolated, in apparent weightlessness on the white of the page, the pebble takes body. Its immense shadow makes it sensitive, vulnerable. And the immanent light, revealing only one face, sharpens its part of secret.

Certain pebble paintings evoke cliffs, with their tormented relief, overlooking a dark sea. As Françoise Armengaud notes, in Marie-Christine Brière: "The stone is no longer in a landscape, it is itself a landscape. Each stone is an island, a land to explore with its caves, its quagmires and its escarpments."

Placed by two or three, sometimes more, the pebbles are arranged in groups in the last notebook. They seem to compose among themselves a colloquium, beyond silence, white. The authors cite this beautiful passage from Langue des pierres where Breton notes, about two stones from the collection he had constituted, the Great Turtle and the Cacique: "There are also some that seem to call each other and that once brought together one can surprise talking to each other." 4

The book combines several voices in dialogue, those of stone dreamers. It is a familiar and ignored land that reveals itself to us in which the infinite grains of hope of a new shore are brought to full light. The secret that Marie-Christine Brière transmits to us through her some three hundred stone paintings, would it not be, as Françoise Armengaud suggests: "the taste for detecting latent splendor not under, beyond, nor behind, appearances but in them, immanent. The very reserved jubilation of gems within the rubble."

Martine MONTEAU