2023-08-20 21:38:00
The plastic artist shows in Caen part of her “Most Beautiful Hours”, paintings produced day by day, like a diary, while she attends in particular the rehearsals of an “Œdipe à Colonne”.
“OUF”, three capital letters painted in red in a circle of French blue on a baby pink background, are displayed on the entrance wall of the Caen art library; a mural in soft and joyful colors which opens and gives its name to Marie-Claire Mitout’s exhibition. You have to reach the first floor to change scale with the hanging of her A4-format gouaches, taken from the series she initiated in 1990, Les Plus Belles Heures. That is more than a thousand paintings first made day after day, then at the free pace of his impressions. Neither diary nor autofiction, although the artist represents herself there as a spectator of exhibitions, with her analyst, on a walk in the footsteps of Pierre Bonnard… lost time and keep only the image of beauty. An image that does not exceed 21 x 29.7 cm, the size of a miniature-looking page that clearly tells the literary value of such a painting – in reference to medieval books of hours.
Huge pupilless eyes
The Most Beautiful Hours are therefore the smallest; the series asks the viewer to get up close to see all of the scenes from the life of Marie-Claire Mitout. The artist has chosen to place this exhibition under the sign of a theatrical series produced in 2018 at the invitation of the director Gwénael Morin, who asked him to attend the rehearsals and performance of his Œdipe à Colonne. First miniature: the flat blue floor, flat pink wall with four wide-open eyes, and standing with a stick in his hand, the actor in blind Oedipus stands at the center of his tragedy of the gaze, like a metaphor for what is happening. plays in the exhibition where two huge pupilless eyes, this time painted directly on the wall, are filled with the statements “ÇA Y EST – TOUT EST NET”.
One wonders what danger the artist was able to escape; what could have happened before this liberating statement. From then on the softness of the colors, the humility of the formats are seen as a response-reaction to the enormous violence of the human tragedy. And when we leave the art library, when we come back to the mention “OUF” we measure the painful reverse meaning: the most beautiful hours of Marie-Claire Mitout form, for the benefit of an implicit verlan, its precious guard -MAD.
“OUF”, Marie-Claire Mitout, artothèque spaces of contemporary art of Caen, until October 7.
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