LUNATIONS

LES LUNAISONS -Text by Anne Kerner

Nandre assembles and descends time, traverses it, retains it, questions it. Let it slip by too. To escape. In her immaculate workshop of La Roche Noire (The Black Rock), on the heights of Clermont-Ferrand, time however appears to escape. The space of her work of fabrics, columns and pots of glass. In the murmur, the rustle, often the breath. Here, one retains his breathing for better swimming. To let itself carry by the river. Because the life becomes fragile and the subtle emotion, invaluable in the wispy air presences. Here, “silence is so large, where the wind starts, where the words of the language are formed… One is there, only completely, in the substance of the air, as one is light!” writing J.M.G. Clézio.

No the wander, nor of drift, therefore. In its large made iridescent fabrics, only impatience, waiting, the absence, slowness… On bleached boards, Nandre scratches, brushes against, tickle some old strengthened tablecloths of hotel and plays of the palimpsest. In immaculate intoxication, the alchemist exasperates the matter, multiplies the coats of paint, leaves reserves. Her hand trails with idleness or trace in the urgency. Words appear. At the place, back… No matter! Often “temporary”, “boredom”, “nostalgia” can be read in texture, graphics. Often, she counts the days like the prisoners, the hours like the schoolboys. With aligned sticks, plumes of hatchings, small ruffled papers or pieces of cords. In the fading of lacteous fabric, that vibrates, is hustled and squabbles. This yields like the reeds under the wind. This is printed like the pressure of a bird’s wing. The magician juggles the rites and the magic spells. She doesn’t insist. Doesn’t affirm. Patiently, she makes and demolishes, builds and unbuilds. Disturbance of the codes. Jammings. The eye is lost without the diaphanous purity and it likes that. Because Nandre seduces and courts. Always in the confidence. The secrecy. Remain “to be and to appear, the unvoiced comment”, like she often notes in small books. Remain the signs, the rhythms, the impulses, the emotions which one does not cease traversing with the eyes and the lips. Thus, between the pleasure and tiredness in love, Nandre makes visible time, the wavering of time. And makes unclassable fabrics “by an inimitable trace, the inscription and obliteration, childhood and the culture, the drift and the invention”, as writes Roland Barthes in connection with Twombly that she venerates.

But worse still. Nandre imprisons the moments in invaluable columns of organza and collects the a-temporal in glass pots filled with water. Because in her workshop-laboratory, she also “fiddles”, as she likes to say, some incredible sculptures light, ludic and dancing. Always on the razor’s edge. Always at the borderline before falling, in weightlessness. Swaying casually to the slightest motion. To the merest passing. With the slightest surprise. Thus, “the Weight of the years” reveals tiny mirrors, pebbles and bones, which hold together by an unknown miracle of nylon wire. “The lapse of memory” reveals optical glasses of different corrections which offer the increased vision of words and bits of words graved on round and limpid forms. “The walk of time” presents a throng of very small feet suspended to long and fine ribbons of organdi. Or “the Urgency” shows again tens of tiny fellows, cut out in a fast blow of scissors, holding hands, trying to climb an infinite spiral. Everywhere, the thorny shredded mesh and the unctuous tarlatan, the irisation of the scraped fabric squares, the transparency of the laboratory pipes and the silk of feathers celebrate in volumes, how much vaporous, the weddings of the present, the past, the future, the instant… In a spider game of lace and knitting, of invention and perfection of the materials, accomodated, collected, that one finds in her poetic pots of glass. There, nothing moves anymore. That’s the rule of “timelessness”, explains the manipulative wirzardry. Motionless, floating on the surface of water and absorbed in depths, a bride drowns in too much love, hands cling to buoys, pearls play with their reflections while one of them seeks its breathing…

With the assistance of air, of water, of moon between fluid and mineral, the artist gives a new life to materials and touches with her dazzled fingers “the number of the movement” about which Aristote talks. She also calls, in the so white extenuation of her haloed work, “the idle period of space and covered with flowers, and with the perfume of the flowers, and with the time of the names of the flowers”, which Fernando Pessoa evokes. Nandre kisses the memory and embraces eternity. The feeric space of Lunations.

THE GRASS IN A STATE OF VIGILANCE

L’HERBE EN ETAT DE VIGILANCE - Text by Roland Duclos

It is the nature of the glance which makes the event. It is its intensity and its ratio on the subject which ensure the event of the latter. And if by inviting us to scan grass, it were us whom the artist observed?

To emit the postulate that Nandre crosses a macrofigurative phase does not belong to one of these writing processes which make it possible to get rid of the cumbersome burden of conceptual or abstract labelling. It would then be enough to identify any mode of expression characterized by the absence of reference, like an enlargement effect of a whole part, to make conspicuous its hermetic banality.
One could thus objectify any type of representation. In this case, no need to resort to this process. The artist does not seek to scramble the tracks. She gives herself the keys of her work: “States of Grass”. A plural multiplying a singular. A unicity in its infinite.

Vegetable variations which do not seek to recognize and name the subject for its characteristics. The grass is seized in a generic acceptance. The man apprehends it while being a surface. It’s about a multiple, an indissociable allowed whole. Except making of it a subject of study who allows the detail to escape to its undifferentiated condition, to its anonymity, to state its properties.

No, what fascinates the plastician to the point to make us share a kind of staggered state, it’s the observation of this absence of status that the herbalist grants to it, for example. Nandre insulates a perimeter which she subjects to our sagacity, as she would take a square of crowd, a band of clouds, or any dimension defined, liquid, mineral, or gas, in order to enjoin us to focus our attention on these spaces whose prolonged everyday life imperceptibly exhausted any interest.

Her intention would be to awake the glance, to put it in a state of vigilance; to some extent to redeem this guilty indifference, this cold ignorance maintained with regard to this component of our landscape; better, of this other part of ourselves which receives our steps, marries our body of which it collected the in love print, and nourish our glance.

If the object of her investigations finds itself renewed, Nandre remains nevertheless faithful to an aesthetic of the isochromy which she maintains in her relationship to the subject and its treatment. The white, in its lilial candour, installs her in a posture of icon, confining with quasi holiness.

There, the matter sees itself defined twice, not without a certain disturbance. Through the transparency and at the same time lactescent opacity. In a light thickness relationship. The matter seems to fluctuate between the thin of its composition and the insistence of its contents which however remain prohibited to our understanding.

As if its significance remained without final object. As if the grass, by its only presence, justified its reason of being. To show us retinal persistence as much that the permanence of the memory or the insistence of undisclosable as much as obscure attachment. The grass pushes inside us, penetrates our intimate being, grows and multiplies. “To cut grass under the feet”, it grows again inside the flesh.
To prove it, Nandre lets saunter a whole impudic theory of these forelimbs, convinced, unbeknownst by us, of their disconcerting vegetable intimacy. She invites us to scan some at some most close tactless anonymity by the means of inprisonment in the “Boxes of vigilance”.

With final, “States of grass” does not solve anything of the mystery of our affinities to the plant. By stating it, while trying to specify its nature, that darkens it more and returns curiously to us essential, inevitable.

Texts by Nandre

States of Grass (Etats d’herbe)

Grass, forgotten fragments of nature which escape our eye for belonging to a whole. Insulated, they become unique and the glance then becomes discerning.

Singular Nature (Singuliére nature)

What is singular, questions, interests; and nature is singular, sometimes very singular! … To see and look at nature, to see there what one had not seen and what one would like to see there…

Dépaysages

A history of order and disorder in nature, another glance on the fragments of landscape and humanity which are moved, broken, shipwrecked.