ANNETTE MESSAGER

Over the past ten years, drawing has taken on a predominant role in the artist’s work, enabling her to express herselffreely, immediately and poetically. ‘My drawings are visual haikus,’ she asserts. Numerous drawings are displayedthroughout the exhibition, interweaving with most of the works, including the 7-metre-long mural installation Enmême temps 2 (2021), which occupies the main wall on the first floor. The artist describes the piece as ‘aconversation between small, very hieratic, very upright effigies, small black sculptures, which figure us humans.They seem to be observing us, while large, narrow, elongated, very organic drawings play with representations ofour bodies, our organs, our fantasies, infiltrating and circulating, seeming to disrupt the dignity of these littleeffigies, all at the same time.’ The vertical drawings in red, black and blue acrylic each convey a vertiginous fall,including motifs representative of the artist’s repertoire such as hands, skulls with arms and legs, spectral figures,a girl-squelette in a tutu, a pair of scissors, shoes, or rarer ones like hopscotch or the organ of the heart.

Drawings also feature in the large-scale installation Laissons aller (2023), shown here for the first time. A coupleentwined in a wisp of smoke overlooks small sculptures of loving embraces covered in black aluminium foil, amaterial shared by Promenade de l’escargot (2019), La Flânerie de l’escargot (2022) and Avec l’oiseau (2022).

‘For me, drawing is a kind of wandering,’ explains Annette Messager, who also draws her inspiration from popularculture. With Iconic (2023), she proposes a composition of drawings based on iconic photographs of 20th-centurypersonalities such as Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. These portraits, all part of our collectivememory - such as the ubiquitous one of Che Guevara with his star-spangled beret, popularized by Andy Warhol -are caught in the artist’s nets, reminiscent of the fascination they held for her when she was growing up in Bercksur-Mer. The black fishing nets she has been transfiguring since the 1990s enclose and protect, and these legendsfind themselves captured for eternity.

‘Drawing is a game,’ adds Messager, who enjoys fusing images, words and symbols. In Hésitation (2023), the cross

• once an instrument of torture and death, now a symbol of eternal life - is transformed into a human silhouette. Afragmented body (a hand, an eye, a mouth) intermingles with words (hesitation, oblivion, cunning, threat, comedy)copied over and over again. The handwriting of a single word, like a silent incantation or magic formula, traces theshapes of the drawing.

‘My drawings always seem to me ghostly apparitions, with just a sheet of paper, emptiness, ink, water...andchance...’ confides Messager, who transforms the gallery’s lower level into colorful, grotesque catacombs with the monumental installation Tête à Tête (2019-2020), where skulls and skeletons move from joy to melancholy, fromlaughter to tears. A collection of seventy-seven allegories of the transience of existence, spontaneously made, withoutrepentance. These vanitas are closer to representations of Mexican calaveras than still lifes as they come to life,smile or grimace, and disguise themselves as planets, clowns, butterflies or ghosts. Sometimes two vanitas sharethe same sheet of paper, holding hands and talking face-to-face. A few words recur: ‘moi toi’ and ‘à mon intime,‘reminding us that this stylistic exercise was created by Messager to ward off her own vulnerability.

On the neighboring wall, the motif of the cross takes shape in Un coup de dé (2022) and Le dé de la passion (2022),a pair of unfolded dice displayed like shedded skin. The dice, symbol of chance and randomness par excellence, alsoevokes the soldiers playing dice with Christ’s tunic from the Gospel of John. One shows off a skeletal body withdismembered hands and tiny legs, while the other sports the instruments of Christ’s passion, such as hammer andladder, and, not without humour, Swiss army knife and saw.

A composition of drawings and small installations such as Ghost (2017) and Tuer le père (2022) complete thepresentation, while the vaulted space houses the sound work Comme si (2022) and Le désir attrapé par le masque(2021). The title is a nod to Pablo Picasso’s surrealist play ‘Le désir attrapé par la queue’; here, a pair of naturalizedpalmipeds, topped with heads of soft toys, perch on a suspended mirror, lit by a twirling bulb. Lastly, the artist’svoice speaks to visitors through Comme si, a phrase alluding to our inclination for pretense, murmured repeatedlylike a litany, akin to the words she diligently reproduces on paper.

Press release courtesy Marian Goodman