2023-11-03 18:11:00
We meet at the Picasso Museum, which is hosting four floors of an exhibition by Sophie Calle on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. On the ground floor, the first rooms, which bear the name of Picalso, reveal the link that developed during the development of this project between the French visual artist and the work of the Spanish painter. When the artist appears, in a summer dress, her face covered by her famous sunglasses, I point out to her that she shares a birthday with this giant of art, since, for her part, she is celebrating her 70th years. She defends herself. True, she was born on October 9, 1953, but claims that it was a coincidence of the calendar.
Sophie Calle was therefore 20 years old when the master died. She doesn’t remember: “At that time, he had no place in my life”. The first ideas for his unique work had not yet germinated. This is why, when it was offered to her, Sophie began by refusing such an exhibition: “I didn’t see how to confront Picasso. » It was while visiting the museum, then dormant due to Covid, that inspiration came to him. The works were packaged, confined under kraft paper, to be protected. “Faced with these ghost Picassos, I could finally envision something. » She photographed them, it was the beginning of this work on absence. Not to mention death.
If the specter of genius lurks in these rooms, the artist is very present. We could almost call it a retrospective as so many aspects of his life are presented there. The public is greeted by a photo of her as a child, in Nice, on the balcony of her grandparents who partly raised her. It prefigures the playful title of the exhibition: “It’s up to you, my cutie!” » As if for her it was a question of speaking today to the child she was, a wild, solitary, a little shy little girl whose parents had separated shortly after her birth, who grew up between the south of France and Paris 14th. “Death was part of my life. I crossed the Montparnasse cemetery every day, living on one side and going to school on the other. And then, my father was a cancer specialist. I couldn’t fear hospitals since my father ruled there. »
The protective object
On a wall, in the exact format of Guernica (a masterpiece painted in 1937 after the bombing of the city), she hung the works of artists she loves and who populate her own house (small paintings, objects, sculptures), a way of not face this impressive place alone. On the first floor, those familiar with the artist will find some of his past works, The blind, See the sea, etc. The second, this astonishing inventory of her own objects for which she called on the auctioneers of the Hôtel Drouot, the famous auction house, in order to establish the catalog. Among them, a piano. Is she playing? “No, but I always thought that if I ran out of ideas, I would learn the piano and that would save me from lack, weariness or sadness. What I will turn to if I no longer want anything. The protective object. »
Sophie Calle’s work is often located on the border of an intimacy recreated by art which gives the public the feeling of knowing her. Why, this time, tell stories through objects? “To detach myself from them, to be able to separate myself from them”, she replies. Wouldn’t it rather be to build a material Sophie Calle capable of becoming immortal? She denies worrying about it and, yet, she dedicated an exhibition to the death of her father, another to that of her mother. On several occasions, she insisted on the emptiness that would come after her. The absence of transmission, the filial gestures which will not be accomplished. However, childlessness is a perfectly accepted choice: “I don’t like the attitude of parents towards their children. And the child, in itself, does not move me. I have no regrets. »
On the top floor, a “catalogue raisonné of the unfinished” presents his unfinished projects: “I am someone who keeps everything, including what is not finished. Since this is about museography, about the career of an artist, I will give you mine. » She recognizes here that this stage of her life, this exhibition is “a sort of assessment since I show everything I have done and not done; my house, my possessions, all my ideas abandoned, even the bad ones. »
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Editorial news from Sophie Calle
Black in White, Gallimard, 29 €
Seventy years, almost forty-five of which devoted to artistic creation, to this inimitable way she has of interweaving texts and photos, of using reality to tell stories, or even of making them emerge from not much, a stranger you meet in the street, a hotel room, a breakup letter. Exactly sixty-one works. He had to count them since a work has just been published (by Éditions Gallimard), Black in White, which brings them all together in a very curious way: the artist associates each of them with a title from the Série Noire. Which is nothing other than a new, fun way of telling stories.
True storiesActes Sud, 148 p., €23
If there is a book that allows us to understand Sophie Calle a little better, it is the one entitled True stories, in perpetual evolution, which she republishes with regularity, each time enriched with new captioned photos. This year’s opus makes the appearance for the first time of his grandfather, a Polish Jew leaving for the United States who, in transit in France, remained there. She also talks about the Montparnasse cemetery, her final resting place and the inventory of her friend Jean Lafont’s objects. The said inventory was the source of inspiration for his exhibition at the Picasso Museum. At Sophie Calle, nothing is lost. Everything is transfigured.
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