When you stay too long on the same subject, learning about all its aspects, you can likely arrive at a kind of "clairvoyance" divine: this is what seems to happen with a greater frequency in the small paintings that Brigitte Aubignac dedicated to Marie-Madeleine, the beautiful, bitter, magnificent lover loved by Christ. The artist hardly sees her anymore, or rather she doesn’t need to see her anymore. Like Titian, his vision has become the chromatic vision of an "inner eye" that is no longer subject to the embarrassment of the refinement of details and the minutiae of reality.

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In her previous series, entitled Au Sanctuaire, Brigitte Aubignac refers to a 16th-century sculpture of the Madeleine, literally attempting, as she wrote, "to paint a roof for herself or a place of devotion", a sacred space in which what is holy seems to have found itself among the things (and figures) of the world, consuming, dismantling and disorienting them. The various veils of color which previously conferred a sort of sculptural dimension and an ancient patina to the various elements are now deliberately hastened, and untied, in so far as they reflect the exhausting daily realization of the saint, of illuminating grace

 

It is as if the French artist did not merely echo an event that combines beauty and penance, which has long troubled and inspired the imagination of painters (from Masaccio to Rubens, from Poussin to Bacon, etc.). His evocation of the great sinners is not a snapshot of the past, because it is constructive and not passive: it is a memory that reconstructs, chooses, chooses, transforms, and interrogates one word, it creates history anew to build a bridge to the future. Aubignac is interested in sudden intuitions and disappoints mythical allusions, any particular reference to the evangelical iconography (oil vase, hair detached, tears of the Madeleine helpless at the foot of the cross). She is concerned with creating an atmosphere, a state of mind, by listing a series of "non-facts" and "non-events" that come together to create a halo, a space in which she can create new possible destinies.

 

The very title of this show, "Après les Larmes" (which can be translated either as "after the tears" or as "behind the tears") seems to allude to an inner process that is perpetuated, a continuous rite of purification, an endless danger of the ego in the attempt of union with the other, transcendent. Marguerite Yourcenar, paradoxically identified with Madeleine, ends up listing a whole series of proud renunciations. She writes, "Escape the repetitiveness of home and bed, the dead weight of money, the cul-de-sac of success, the satisfactions of love, the fascination of infamy". In other words, she believes she has given up the slavery of things for freedom of spirit. It is also the way to explain Aubignac’s decision to use certain images that give the impression of evaporating or being translated into pure ghosts that migrate beyond mirrors, and it also helps to explain the distant and worldly scene of Danse: The fact is that dance makes the body lose its usual gestures and adherence to things and places it in a world that goes beyond codes and makes it a sign inscribed between heaven and earth.
 

However, if we ask the question in this way, one might think that each subject is placed in religious contact. The fifteen "stations" that make up Aubignac’s installation have no rhetorical basis, no coded sign of grace, and no stereotyped participation in the divine. On the contrary, as revealed by the subtle philosophical investigations of Andrea Emo, "The but knowable is created, it is the creation of consciousness", which is a way of saying that the sense of transcendence that is embodied in works triggers new learning processes, unexpected "analytical reflections" in the very sense of creation. Perhaps the use of the diptych by the artist works as a kind of dilation of the meaning to be represented: to the detachment of all narrative restrictions, to the lack of commemoration, to the way the artist looks at the figure, not frontally, but always with a hesitant eye, a side-by-side look, where even the addition of a second panel does not classically complete the scene, nor does it close the story, but on the contrary opens it up and makes it a melting pot of meanings and opposite meanings.

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Rightly, Aubignac conceives the diptych above all as an articulated representation of the character and his attributes (as could be the case of Marie-Madeleine and her oil vase). But then we find ourselves faced with the art of contracts or permanent displacements: dubbing, games of reflections, dizzying enlargement effects. This means that the association of images takes place at an even deeper level, at the very roots of language. Thus, if on the one hand, "the essence of the character is immediately made visible", on the other hand, the vision does not coagulate and does not hold together in its depths.

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But I must make another remark about the small size of images (like modern miniatures), also because it brings us back to the idea that I mentioned at the beginning of "clairvoyance". In Aubignac’s work linear perfection, with its harmonies, its details, its cruelty, never has the upper hand, nor the delicacy of a touch quite capable of obsessively transmitting the smallest parts of life always triumphs: She prefers an expressive, "theatrical", even a flamboyant painting, which also offers various points of view and multiple formal analogies. His series Après les larmes is a world that beats, wavering on the edge of the visionary. In this way, however, Aubignac seems to see far, very far (in history, in legends), and she pierces the thin horizon of our usual behavior: yesterday and today are stacked together on the same panels, united under the sign of Madeleine. The styles, places, and lights change, it’s true, however, the artist is right to say: "My diptychs may even be illuminated by an electric light, but it is their internal light that is really bright". They are enlightened by their depth, it is their distance that brings them closer and their minimalism that exalts their potential for expression.