In this «almost» retrospective that Brigitte Aubignac has chosen to present at the Paul Valéry Museum in Sète, the artist allows us to discover a large number of works that highlight the scope of her work. This panorama of more than twenty years of painting, from 2003 to 2024, allows us to judge the extent of her talent, which she has developed tirelessly since her first paintings at the end of the 1980s. We will not go back so far in his pictorial adventure, even if the first paintings already contained this form so sensitive and intimate characteristic of his work and already affirmed his desire to paint, still in oil, despite the reluctance of a time that was contrary to it. It was a long and patient journey to finally meet new days more inclined to the discovery of his work. His journey is therefore inserted in a time of long duration, whereas in the works themselves painting tells us a thousand things about its eternity, the continuity of its message, and the possibility of establishing a link between the past and the present in a reappropriation of history. Without a desire to break, the work of Brigitte Aubignac testifies to contemporaneity in touch with the real, in the imagination of representation, but also in the reality of being and the evidence of a presence or an action.  The artist patiently elaborates his research and transcribes it in a pictorial expression that is both strong, sensitive, and introspective, but also impertinent and ironic, revealing faces, looks, and bodies revealing their emotions, doubts, pain, and joy, with the characteristic delicacy of some of the female figures who inhabit his paintings, but also with the determination of Giacometti’s Man Walking, mentioned several times in the latest works, or with the violence and anxiety that we feel in some of the portraits here exhibited, such as Le Cri.

 

The artist thus cultivates emotion as the engine of the subjects she develops, a real emotion, lived, suggested through the expression of a contrasting and complex vitality transcribed, without complacency, beyond a desire for seduction, but in the revealed reality of appearances. Often faces, but also imaginary or real characters referring to the intimacy of the human being, pushing us to think, creating fun, introspection and sometimes a certain emotional disorder. It offers us galleries of portraits and characters that it declines over time according to themes that it calls «series» whose development is articulated in successive moments, in sequences which are never breaks but only passages as the paintings as a whole retain their homogeneity. The exhibition thus presents works belonging successively to the series of Portraits Anonymes (2003-2004), then to that entitled Les Garçons (2005-2008). In the chronology of the artist’s journey comes the series Les Faunes, a fresco that, like a legendary tale, touches the boundaries of mythology marked by eternal values, but also takes up current subjects. This set of works occupies a large period of his production (2006-2018). It was the subject of an exclusive presentation in 2018 at the Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier in Paris. For this reason, in the exhibition, Brigitte Aubignac has chosen to represent this theme only through the triptych: Le Faune à la bassine. Representative of the hybrid beings of the faunas series, he introduces perfectly, through his intimate character, the series Les Maquillages (2014-2015) and entitled Les Insomnies (2009-2024). In the continuation of this journey, was born in 2022 the cycle of paintings Statues etc.  This set of paintings and gouaches (only oils on canvas are present in the exhibition) connects a conception of an imaginary present to the distant times of an art history that the artist freely travels through through a confrontation more plastic than emotional, giving prominence to quotations and thus contributing to “mirror the multiplicity and richness of our cultures,” says the artist, as a counterpoint to today’s avalanche of images.

 

The figure occupies a decisive part in the work of Brigitte Aubignac and all series, excluding Statues etc., is attached to the humanity of the subjects represented in their simplicity, in their daily life, as surprised by a stop on image, Revealing the vivacity of expressions and witness of a stolen moment. To accentuate this fleeting impression of the action, in the sequel to Portraits Anonymes, the characters are characterized by an attribute or function, one casually displaying her bra (Le Soutien-gorge1), the other loudly shouting out her anger (La Militante). The artist thus presents a gallery of original personalities, symbols of a way of being, of a form of existence that is both real and fictional. It involves us in a story that we could write, as in the movie credits «that this has no relation with real facts and any resemblance to existing characters is fortuitous»... We have some doubts, however, about this anonymity, because Brigitte Aubignac feeds her work of impressions, sensations, feelings, and details collected from life. These portraits and figures are therefore challenging because they represent the staging of minor but essential facts and events, capable of arousing curiosity and attracting the eye of the visitor fond of anecdotes and intrigues, able to activate his imagination and nourish his feelings. The verve of these Portraits Anonymes is found, a little later around 2019-2020 in Selfies, shots on the spot, reproducing the fleeting moment.

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This same ability to reconstruct the experience is found in the series Les Garçons, perhaps less anonymous than the previous one because it was probably inspired by her son, then a teenager, present in her daily life during the period when she executed this set of small paintings. The inspiration is more intimate, more familiar, and comes alive in descriptions of interior scenes that serve as a setting for a central character, always a boy, whose characteristics and attitudes emphasize youth, or maturity sometimes, but also the mood: casualness, concern, indifference, joy... These are portraits of attitudes in built-in environments that concentrate on the presence of the model in a realistic but brief setting. The artist works on the detail of bodies, clothes and space according to a pictorial technique that emphasizes the current situation while adopting traditional techniques of image construction with respect for classical perspectives and precision of forms. In these small works, the evocation of barely sketched spaces is diluted into the freedom of rapid, sensitive, and suggestive execution. Inside the places, just sketched, each character lives his own existence, defined by an action, an attitude, an object, a framework almost anecdotal that fits into a scene of ordinary life, suggesting a humanity so similar to ours, but also so universal.

 

The vivid and touching emotion is expressed even more in the Make-up series. Series of small paintings, close-ups, and striking expressiveness, which are in all shades of white, cream, and pink, reveal an exclusive moment of women’s toiletries. That moment when faces writhe and contort in order to achieve the perfection of the image so desired. We are not far from an archetypal representation of these female figures, occupied with their make-up, even if, in a number of portraits, we can recognize the author who gives us here reserved and personal moments. Some self-portraits, therefore, and other faces as spontaneous, expressive and so vibrant metamorphose in the mirror at the time of toilet. The theme is singular but reminds us that the woman at her toilet was a recurring subject in the history of painting. From Titian to Bonnard, through Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Degas, and so many others, artists have long painted this secret, almost immodest moment. With Brigitte Aubignac, the time of the intimate is here the subject of variations, as in music, able to translate into shadow and light the truth of beings with an offside sometimes full of humor but also so serious! Moments of eternity in the transient of the moment would say, Baudelaire. The pink beige camaïeux restores the carnation enhanced by the contrast of a dark look or by the highlighted lipstick. Eyes wide open, mouth half-open, cheeks caressed by the blush are offered to the expert hand that proceeds to the metamorphosis. The action is accompanied by a diptych composition accentuating the almost caricatural character of a moment of tension aimed at desired perfection. "It does not matter that the cunning and the artifice are known to all, wrote Baudelaire, if success is certain and the effect always irresistible." The gaze of the absent spectator invents the virtual psyche in which the face is reflected. The illusion is total and reminds us of the artist’s taste for anecdotes and his attachment to scenes from ordinary life. Then, according to this same story, practiced to transcribe particular moments of existence, Brigitte Aubignac paints Les Insomnies which shows a woman who sleeps flees. She confronts her exasperation and by vain attempts of diversions, she tries to find rest. Here a sofa supports her fatigue, she crouches and gives in, and their cushions support her boredom. So many tired and depressed attitudes suggest many sleepless nights that the artist would have known and from which she shares with us impressions of loneliness and distress. The subject is unusual, far from the countless sleepers of art history, these insomniacs challenge their originality and realism. The theme is bold and the artist responds with his pictorial verve capable of describing a thousand states of mind, supported by a palette of often vivid colors that softens the blackness of painful moments.  But the difficulty of being continues and we will recognize in some small works from 2016-2018 a series of dark self-portraits in which tension is expressed in a black-dominated register and among which the work of Le Cri is the most significant. A gagged woman tries to scream her despair, helplessness, anguish, and rage. A piece of white paper stuck in her mouth silences her and her intense, desperate look calls for help. The painter represents herself here in a striking self-portrait, the testimony of her fears and confinement caused, perhaps, by the artist’s isolation and forced loneliness long removed from official channels, because she is a woman and because she is a painter. Beyond a personal problem, this cry also means that even today and even though time has filled many gaps, the condition of women – of some women – remains conflictual, unequal, and sometimes terribly dangerous.

 

But times change and during the last three years, nourished by a new inspiration, has imposed the series Statues etc.. This is a set of paintings, all of which are stage sculptures; a fictitious accumulation of statues that belong to the history of art and that the artist integrates into heterogeneous compositions where civilizations meet, the times, in a cheerful bazaar that looks like an imaginary museum very untidy. This scholarly disorder does not favor any hierarchy, any style, nor refers to any particular epoch. It constitutes an animated, contradictory, and timeless vision of a re-visited art history. A Dancer by Degas meets a sculpture by Giacometti, the Spider Mother by Louise Bourgeois frightens The Three Graces by Pradier, the African statuary meets the spirit of the Renaissance... The artist competes in skill in the scores of this baroque concert made of improbable juxtapositions, but always harmonious. She suggests that “it is a courtyard of miracles, or a recreation for statues where works from different eras would converse fortuitously, assembled by taste and affinity or by simple formal play.” The pictorial touch is affirmed and the acid colors, often yellows and greens build a joyful hymn to art of all times.

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Brigitte Aubignac, in all circumstances, affirms her attachment to the long history of painting but never fails to indicate that her work is current and part of a movement that, beyond appearances, surpasses the images, whose incessant flows scroll on our screens. His works are distilled into a slow and sensitive sensation, both penetrating and mysterious, and transmit to the deepest of the being impalpable and unfathomable energies. They reveal themselves and move us, this is the mystery of his paintings.