Virginie Barré . The clear forms, life at sea

About

In 2012, Virginie Barré, accompanied by Claire Guezengar and Florence Paradeis, wrote and directed her first film, a short film entitled Odette Spirite. Born in the year of the theatrical release of François Truffaut's L'Enfant sauvage , the artist has never made a secret of his taste for the cinema: since its inception, all of its plastic production footprint.But going behind the camera marked a turning point in his work, especially in his relationship to the object. From Odette Spiriteobjects have emerged as an essential dimension of his films, both abstract and meaningful signs, props and actors. Returning for the most part from film to film, as motifs, they draw the territory. Many are primarily used;familiar and domestic objects, bought new or minted, they are hardly, if not at all, transformed. Conversely, others are entirely created in the workshop. Meanings, even denouements, spring from their particular associations on the screen. The hitherto best known part of the artist's practice - staged mannequins and fine-line drawings - was already similarly governed by these principles, which are those of montage. Since then, however, there has been an upheaval: disrupting categorical benchmarks, disturbing the boundaries between dream and reality, the camera has breathed a soul into objects that were thought to be inert. Wrongly…

Short and crossed by topics dear to their author, such as childhood, dreams, elsewhere, death or disguise, Virginie Barré's films come under different registers. Some, such as The Shape of Dreams (2013) and The Holidays of April (2016), reflect an intimate approach, in direct contact with life. Others required the setting up of a filming logistics and affirm a happy inclination for the collaborations and the collective. Thus, a first season of seven episodes of the series La Cascadeure (2018), which she has just finalized, with Romain Bobichon and Julien Gorgeart, or Geometric Dream(2017), here screened for the first time in Paris. The latter plays the dreamlike transport of one of his two daughters, filmed asleep on his beach towel. A procession is soon organized: there is a whole costumed community whose members, carrying banners, umbrellas or hoops brightly colored, undertake to move. Their choreographed movements, the compositions they orchestrate with their gestures, their bodies, outline a new kind of assemblage of forms, very much alive. As for the play of shadows created by their silhouettes, with large flat patches on the sandy expanse, they are reminiscent of unpublished drawings of the artist.

Virginie Barré's installations, sculptures and drawings anticipate, cross or extend the universe of her films. On the occasion of his personal exhibition at the Loevenbruck gallery, we will discover their posters, as well as two models, Josephine and Simone , conceived after (or rather, after) The Geometric Dream . Along with his early films, a new type of abstract installations appeared in the artist's work. Exhibited at the gallery, The Japanese Table(2018) shows the association of various objects. The choices that presided over their arrangements, the rhythm that is theirs, contribute to the impression of a narration.However, this organization that we sense is meaningful is, here again, comparable to the dialectical conflict governing the editing process.

Initiated in 2009 and already underpinned by a strong curiosity for Japan and its traditional arts, the series of "Charades" announced some features, through the combination of heterogeneous elements in small suspended modules.

Marie Chênel, June 2018