PESO

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Weight and proportion

 

The first time I came into contact with Annabelle Moreau's work

was in 2019, at the artistic residency AiR 351. That year, Moreau

was developing research around the idea of temporality in the

proportional relationship with her body. One of the works she was

working on, from a larger set of drawings, materialized this idea of

a temporal extension in the length of a sheet (in reality a roll) as a

drawing many meters long and, in the width of that sheet, the

measure of her body. These drawings, entitled “Drawing in action”,

pose two immediate questions: the first concerns the observation

of the drawing, which is impossible to grasp in its entirety. The

second, in my understanding, with a performative idea inscribed in

the act of drawing and in its physical correspondence with the

exposure and manipulation of the drawing, suspended by her body

to the floor or on a table and developing in its extension on it floor,

causing folds and accumulations that, suggesting a sensual

movement, appear as an almost kinetic sculpture.

In the development of this work, which operates between drawing

and sculpture, the presence of the body is transformed through a

geometric and perfectly symmetrical figuration in the position of

the artist's arms, which could eventually be her legs. To these two

elements are added two other rectilinear components: a table legs

that seem to support the entire choreography that stages this work,

recalling a formal constructivist matrix, and a self-referential

memory closely linked to her experience in Africa, to the ritual to

which the body is subject between animism and theism.

The movement of the body, almost absent, is thus a temporal

extension of a memory revisiting, being gravity, which the

unwinding of the weight of the drawing towards the room floor

announces, the starting point for the other works that make up this

exhibition: “Reclining lead 1” and “Reclining lead 2”.

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These two pieces, made of wood and lead, seem to oppose the

subtlety, and apparent lightness, of the long drawings on paper, but

nevertheless they are built using processes similar to those of the

works on paper, I would even say replicated ones. Firstly, a central

issue in this work: the measurement of the artist's body. Secondly,

memory, and thus an idea of temporality. The lead sheets, objets

trouvés, are not Duchampian ready-mades, but objects found and

requalified in their form and function, being worked on, including

sewn, to represent the measurements of the artist's body. Lead has

a historical presence as a plastic material throughout the 20th

century: it is heavy, but also ductile and moldable, qualities that

allow it to build a bridge with the women classic representation,

although it is a material associated to the male gender. Citing the

artist's reflections, “lead was used to saturate the pigment in the

painting, causing its opacity and smooth texture. It was one of the

main pigments used in portraits of reclining goddesses, a theme

that allowed the representation of female nudes in historical

paintings.”

In other words, the table is the structural element that remains as a

memory and tool of the work process itself allowing the abstract

figuration shaping placed before the viewer, in a connection with

written language, in the title of these works, “Reclining lead”,

reactivating a visual memory of reclining female figures.

In Annabelle Moreau's work we are confronted with a dialogical

process between references of Western art history and references

from another history, her own life stories and experiences.

Therefore, it seems important to me to mention time, memory and

the body as the main vectors of her work.

However, her work process is, in my opinion, broader, because it

integrates the appropriation of material and spiritual elements that

transform her works into palimpsests that are continually rewritten

by associated and replicated processes and methodologies,

something like a medieval parchment.

João Silvério

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Supported by:  João Portugal Ramos Vinhos