Wherever we will go, we will bring with us our memories as something that we thoughtless collected by chance, which is now impossible to voluntarily delete.
Annette Messager turns the eclectic impulses that hit her mind into concrete messages through which she subtly communicates with the external world. The French artist involves the visitors into a journey through the spaces of Parisian Marian Goodman Gallery, which starts in the sort of petrified garden recreated by the installation Mes Transports and ends in the lower gallery, where the suspended universe of Continents Noirs takes place. Playing on the equivocal stillness of moving elements, Mes Transports features 21 sculptures displayed on wooden trolleys cushioned by folded removal blankets. The figures are grotesque agglomerates of various human and animal’s body parts, geometrical forms and other objects, wrapped in black mat foil and boundaryless fused together like in an oniric fantasy where everything fades under the hallucinatory associations of the subconscious. These transports are in essence as real as they are metaphorical, showing the transportation of goods, of love, of blood, joy objectified in the sinister scluptures, which come protected by thick blankets as the ones used by travelers to soften their journey. A deep conceptual coherence allow a perpetual and mutual interaction between the pieces transposed in a silent dialogue. The same ambiguous expectation of an imminent movement intensifies in Continents Noirs, an installation of geometric black continents turned upside down that doesn’t drift, but motionless remain suspended above our heads while their back shadows dance on the walls to the pendular rhythm of the lights which illuminate the room. Our mesmerizing gaze is caught in a deceptive perspective game. The paradoxes and tensions of our contemporary reality are ironically explored by Messager in her latest works, such as The Tutu èchelevé, an haired tutu ruffled by a fan.
Our collection of memories is conveyed to the others by our own way of being, as memories shape the soul, sometimes giving birth to the artistic creation subjected to various and multiple interpretations.
