Assis, debout, couché

Old foam mattresses on which twenty poorly rough pavers freeze, all sprinkled with confetti. Three types of modest objects previously collected, “unprocessed”, or barely. Three materials that only have in common that they are abundant and cheap. Three trivial, banal gestures. Three times nothing or not much, the piece not even having the politeness of a title to let us start the interpretive machine. This silent work by Anita Molinero (*1953, Floirac, France) reveals certain essential principles of her art. Indeed, it does not take long to understand that mattresses, pavers and confetti condense a certain idea of the street — interviewed at the level of the asphalt — and the ghosts of the bodies that take hold of it, those of the homeless, of the rebels, of the party-goers. So many figures of what, in public space, goes beyond the established order. The set symbolically freezes something on the order of the day after a big evening, of the scrapping of flags.

In terms of art, it should be noted that the work, which does not exceed twenty centimeters in height, still has the audacity of claiming to be sculpture. We know the good word, attributed depending on the version to Barnett Newman or Ad Reinhardt: “Sculpture is what you encounter when you step back to look at a painting.” Molinero has always claimed, if not sought, this aggressiveness specific to the medium. A violence that is found especially in the impure, lacking quality, materials that make up his work: omnipresent in modern life, they have long remained hidden from the eyes of art. By using them, there is no question for the artist to transfigure the miserable, or to replay, as in a bad soap opera, the eternal reconciliation of art and life. It's more about delving into an aesthetic blind spot to bring back the crudest, but also the most familiar, heaps of reality. Indeed, it is the strength of this assemblagist sculpture to be established in a No Man's Land between figurative fiction and “readymade”. To fully understand it, you must hear the artist marvel at the Fourteen-year-old dancer by Degas, as much for its vicious air as for the tulle tutu and the silk bustier covered by the bronze statue.

Thus, whether one places oneself in a symbolic or material register, depending on whether one considers the assembled objects or what composes them, the “mattress sculpture”, since we must name it well, expresses the provocation and arrogance characteristic of Molinero's work. This lost work is reinterpreted here. It is the starting point of the exhibition, which features a dozen sculptures created over the last ten years. Each evokes a body station in its own way. Mattresses sit side by side with a delivery table, wheelchairs or assemblies that look like walkers. Sitting, standing, lying down: the condition of bodies and sculptures is reduced to the injunctions specific to dressage. It is possible to detect a sarcastic comment on the physical norms from which the minority bodies summoned here escape: disabled people, pregnant women, homeless people.

Paul Bernard