Personal exhibition " Museo Immaginario "

 

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Commissioner: Dominique Stella
Exhibition from 21 October to 1 December

Sparc Venice Art Factory, Campo Santo Stefano 2828a, San Marco, Venice.
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Works of art are quasi-people. They are the only objects in our western culture that have an existence and a capacity for interaction similar to those of subjects. This is what the English anthropologist Alfred Gell has argued. These are things to which we recognize a soul, which is not very different from the animism or shamanic magic of other cultures. I enter a museum and look at an object. A piece of cast bronze, a linen cloth covered with pigments: what I see are not the material characteristics, but the transcription of the artist’s thoughts, intentions, desires - his soul transcribed on mine, for a brief moment or for a lifetime.

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Brigitte Aubignac presents group images, or rather family portraits (mainly gouaches and oils on canvas), where more or less recognizable sculptures replace relatives, friends, relatives, Great-uncles we never met. These are extended, inclusive, chronologically transversal families that bring together Buddha and Giacometti, the Little Mermaid and the Moai of Easter Island, Rodin, ancient Egypt, classical Greece, Marc Quinn and Louise Bourgeois. Each room of the imaginary Museum of Brigitte Aubignac offers us groups differently composed, and invites us to the game of recognition of the one we are familiar with ("I have the impression of knowing him!"), because familiarity with works of art tells us something common that is forged for each one more or less consciously by the presence and action they exert on the culture to which we belong. Moreover, the staging of Brigitte Aubignac also draws potential relationships between the different works, which the systems of historical and geographical categorization would hardly allow in reality. It is as if she wanted to show us not only the importance that each work had on her (the one meeting, the one transcription of the soul), but the complex web that the different works have woven with the threads of her thought, to make her the artist she is. What appeared to be a family portrait turns out to be a kind of self-portrait - and maybe it still is.

 

If you look carefully, in the different rooms of the Imaginary Museum, you will notice the recurring presence of a particular sculpture, the Dancer by Degas. She is often a figure included in the group with others. But sometimes she takes an eccentric position, as in the work Salle XXV, where she appears in profile while seeming to observe an archaic sculpture before her. Or even more openly in the work Salle XI, where the dancer is presented in the foreground, with her back, in front of all other works. The transcription of the souls with the inanimate object is so intense that the dancer becomes Brigitte Aubignac, who looks through her eyes - and in the meantime adds a ring, her painting, to this limitless spatial- temporal, in which my eyes become his and the dancer’s. If we were to think of the museum as a static entity, freezing the power of works in the cage of institution and history, we could not find a more effective objection than the oxymoric Musée imaginaire de Brigitte Aubignac, tells us with simplicity and grace that it is either an imaginary museum or it is not at all.

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Luca Berta & Francesca Giubilei