Dérangée

To abstract

Anita Molinero is a sculptor... sculptor... can you tell me? In short Anita is an artist, for sure!

In a spirit of contradiction I decided to start the “Derangée” exhibition with a “painting” salon: the largest room in L'Académie du SHED has nothing on the ground, everything is on the walls.

“Sculpture is something you bump into when you go back up to look at a painting.” This quote from Barnett Newman1 can be translated as: “Sculpture is something you stumble upon to look at a painting.” In this first room of the exhibition, there is no problem, you can go back as much as you want, you don't run into anything to admire the artist's entire pictorial palette.

Everything in this quote is about the work of Anita Molinero: it's right, full of humor to the point of mockery, ambiguous about the relationship between these two “heavyweights” in the history of art who are painting and sculpture, it's about the relationship with space and more precisely about the exhibition space and finally it's so down-to-earth!

Anita Molinero has her feet on the ground, things are simple, effective, what you see is... what you see. When it doesn't hold up, it stalls. When it doesn't fit, it cuts. When it doesn't stick, it welds. When it's not high enough, she overlays. When it's too much, it crushes. And above all, when she does not have a title for her works, she names them Untitled.

Anita is a great colorist, almost never producing her “own color.” Warmth allows it to express all the variations of a color “imposed” by the material itself. A palette of natural shades appears thanks to this operation. The light blue of Glaring scabs blue season Changes to navy blue in the heat. The translucent green of their frame also changes it, depending on the angle from which we look. But since the artist does not impose any rules or dogma on himself, he also sometimes adds paint and blurs the tracks.2

In this first room of L'Académie we can admire everything that she is capable of producing in pictorial terms. We are facing an explosion of colors, materials, collages, assemblies and other compositions that make us see everyday objects, waste, waste, differently. Beauty and elegance can come out of nowhere, Anita proves it to us every moment. The banal becomes exceptional, the trace becomes gesture and the mastery of deformation and limits becomes style. Anita definitely has a style.

The rest of the exhibition invites us to rediscover his “classics” and two rather singular pieces. La Grosse Bleue It's aptly named, it's huge and blue. Here we are facing a ladder that Anita is more used to dealing with. La Grosse Bleue imposes itself, crushes us and derails the proportions of this room: these objects clearly have nothing to do with it and that is good. Besides, we barely know what these things are. La Grosse Bleue is two and has always been two. On the other hand, it is the fourth version of this piece: Anita Molinero allows herself to rework her works, both the material itself and the way in which they are presented. La Grosse Bleue could be shown, for example,: the two forms suspended one above the other, at the Palais de Tokyo; on the ground with one part horizontally and the other vertically, at the Thomas Bernard Gallery.

These two industrial tanks are supposed to be buried and, in addition, in factories. These types of objects are not familiar to us, just like polystyrene insulation which, after purchase, usually by professionals, ends up hidden in our walls and ceilings. For Anita Molinero it is her daily life: she has a lot of affection for these objects left behind, these improbable and non-noble materials par excellence, an “anti-marble” in a way. Anita Molinero gloats in car junkyards, plastic factories and professional supplier depots. She likes trash, scraps, trash and their containers.

Yes, Anita has had a special relationship with the plastic trash can for many years. The trash can is his totem object, a kind of stuffed toy or Madeleine in his artistic career. The trash cans are there, in our streets, around our houses, in garages, in dedicated premises, often hidden, sometimes very visible. They are much less so in galleries, art centers and museums. Unlike mysterious objects and materials, it is impossible for us not to recognize plastic trash cans by their shape and color. Anita deforms them, assembles them, heats them up, even burns them. The trash cans become chandeliers, fountains, walls or sculptures similar to statuary. During the clash, in the Académie park where the SHED team is cleaning these famous trash cans, a woman approaches me and asks me timidly:

- “What does that represent?

- Uh... a trash can...”

A mutual discomfort sets in: she did not know how to recognize a trash can; I did not know how to say that it was an abstract sculpture.

In the last two rooms, trash cans are in the spotlight. The first, Untitled Death, seems to want to fly away, Anita has tripled its initial width by stretching it to the sides. A kind of surreal green flight in a room with beautiful parquet floors, moldings and a fireplace: an aesthetic shock in a way. The impression is repeated in the last room of the exhibition with another type of trash can, more discreet than the first.

Two works exhibited in and on the fireplaces in the second and third rooms illustrate in an exemplary way how capable Anita is of reinventing herself, of going off the beaten path that those who have followed her work for many years know. There, there are strange pieces: the waste from a plastic factory facing its bronze double, acting as andirons; an improbable assembly of concrete irons and animal fur, a kind of magical object enthroned on a bourgeois fireplace.

Finally, as always, the SHED offers invited artists to produce an edition, a multiple that can be sold. Together with Anita, we chose to publish ten copies of a small 3D print, numbered and signed, where we see Anita, sitting on a trash can, smoking: it's called From Murano to Haribo and that says it all.

Jonathan Loppin

1. Famous American painter and figure of abstract expressionism (1905-1970). This quote is sometimes attributed to Ad Reinhart (1913-1967), another great painter, also American, also from New York but representing minimal and conceptual art instead.

2. This is the case on Crimson Scabs (acrylicated), and the Tank bottoms from the first room.

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