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forbidden at the time. In observing a body, we are watching a spectacle in reverse.
It is in the spirit of this relationship, still exploited in the 18th century, that Alexine
progresses when she delivers her intuitive explorations. While in the current exhibition
we are confronted with a live body (the artist’s own), the stakes are nevertheless
similar.
The displayed/exhibited body refers to the conquest of a universe, the closest and the
farthest from the artist’s, namely our own.
Therein lies our escape: submit to the reality of assessment (observation); submit to
our desire for discovery.
The typographically loaded definitions that frame the artist’s iconic work punctuate the
swatch of semantic offshoots, which, figuratively speaking, are akin to so many
porches, doors, windows, passageways, outlets or openings.
The word and the image are confronted, as are, in space, the reception-room and the
bathroom. This juxtaposition of linguistic and iconic messages naturally leads the
viewer to connect them: complementarity, opposition, substitution, reflexivity.
While a definition attempts to specify, or at least to outline, the essential
characteristics of a subject, Alexine Chanel uses its contiguousness with the image to
multiply the network of meanings. Thus the printed word will open up by degrees a
web of meanings that a picture will delineate, and so on, in a tree-like process.
Lastly, the scenography of exhibitions reflects the artist’s vision of public and private
spaces.
Always at the core: “the living”, its dark, variegated, radiant shapes, its heart, its
antics, its emotions...and, as a supplement, an invisible calling card, for if some visual
signs, mind games or witticisms beckon us, others do not.
Thus Alexine Chanel lends us the means to see what we as observers, by definition,
cannot. The unassuming bonus she provides is that calling card, invisible to everyone
yet within everyone’s reach: a colour swatch from which one has to decide which
shade to choose.
This sliver of the whole, which suddenly transmutes all, takes shape in some of the
artist’s pictures in the guise of intriguing arrangements/surreptitious liaisons with
desire. The bigger the format – such is the paradox – the more they appear to us as
simple fragments or clues to the route that we – with the help of the swatch – have
mapped in ourselves: trail markers magnified according to our individual destinations.
Jean-François Thomasset
MARS WWW.MARSINBERLIN.COM +49(0)1632613860 KÖPENICKER STRASSE 147 D–10997 BERLIN