Noone ever asks us about language: this phrase, accompanying one of Annick Blavier's ink-jet prints, resounds like an enigmatic and fraternal echo of the questions she, herself, asks. Enigmatic, because the fragment — of a sentence or image — is the touchstone of her work. Fraternal, because Annick Blavier works with the transversal — mirror images, boundary crossings.
She is constantly recreating her place, at the centre of a dialogue where philosophers — like Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze — writers and film-makers — Kafka and Godard — meet. Or just ordinary people, like me, you, us, her, as a little bit of history (our personal history, as passers-by, witnesses, or spectators) erupts within History, through images cut out of old magazines.
Cut out? More like ripped out. Stolen, hijacked, in an action where nothing is accidental: the act of tearing. Tearing, this wild and inspired piece of borrowing, feat of memory, political act, kaleidoscope of the century, Annick Blavier tells us, shatters the harmony of the original composition. It also sparks a degree of conflict with mediatised memory, and perhaps also some resistance as a result, above and beyond nostalgia.
Resistance. We've said it. This patient work, which joins the accidental with deliberate decision, is an open breach in our pre-composed, pre-digested world, ready to eat, and to throw away. It is built up from details that caught the artist's attention, for social, personal or graphic reasons. Old newspapers, found photographs, fragments that raise the banal to the status of icon as glowing apparitions, making us aware of our own language, the unique way each of us divides space, time and the constant flow of images before our eyes.
Intimate demand, a survival instinct that Annick Blavier awakens, revitalises, as much out of necessity as a sense of play. An exacting and sophisticated game, with its own rules: shifting the boundary between photography, collage, the printed image and text, attempting to establish new relationships between these different elements. Here, she offers us diptychs, triptychs and series whose complex balance throws up a question, or the beginning of a story: a nucleus vibrating with energy, offered for us to pursue at our liberty.
© Caroline Lamarche
Writer,
Namur, 2006