Tearings and Borrowings by Annick Blavier
By Claude Lorent
“La Libre Belgique”, December 2015
Exhibition En décalage, Association du Patrimoine artistique, Brussels
“Each exhibition of torn and collage images by Annick Blavier, whether recent or shown before, elicits careful analyses, influenced by the state of mind of the visitor, the state of the world and the moment of confrontation. The timelessness of these fragmented images and the absence of narrative - even if a detail of clothing or suchlike might indicate a particular period or even a geographic or social identity - allows for a multitude of interpretations, renewable at each new contact. Currently, for example, the process of tearing, which the artist has been using for a very long time, has taken a more dramatic turn, all the more fundamentally tragic because there is no escaping, either in her way of seeing, or her state of mind, or her vital vibrations, what constructs or destroys us from day to day. And, as Brassens put it, time has nothing to do with it. One of the strengths of these compositions is that they continually enlighten us, awaken us, make us more conscious, stir us psychologically, and enable us to mine the depths of our memory. And lead us to position ourselves in the world.
“Uncertain frontiers: We might think that the work of Annick Blavier - through its use of collage and borrowings from the media - belongs to a span of history extending from Picasso to Warhol, via Rauschenberg and the poster artists, if only to mention those who have won recognition. But the essence of her work resides in the manner in which she distinguishes herself from them, through an aesthetic of sobriety, an economy of means, a fundamental originality within which positioning on the page, the neutrality of the background, the addition or not of a word or phrase, and especially whether there has been a single or double tearing, all play a primordial role. In itself, this aesthetic makes sense to the extent that it guides, engenders or provokes an interpretation. Through it, the viewer enters into a dialogue, as if the work and viewer are talking to each other. Each proposition is open, stripped of arguments and receptive to those of the other or others. There is an exchange. But there is absolutely no way the wounds in the paper can be ousted. We can ignore their undefined boundaries, which cut off a part of reality and lead us to wonder as much about what is shown as what has been removed. About a form of intentional anonymity that makes them more universally accessible. The tears are not clean-cut; they are the result of a human gesture engaging both the physical and the mental.
“Connexions: We will resist the strong temptation to impose a particular viewpoint, leaving virgin territory for each viewer. We will simply note that each torn work features a detail, a subject, a behaviour. That there are two preponderant kinds of motif. Priority is given to the human, to the person, since, albeit segmented, it is nevertheless present. The other priority is the urban and sometimes art (Géricault). The absence or obliteration of the word is a voluntary or temporal silence, perhaps a form of respect, whereas verbal traces automatically create possible connections and interpretations. That the formats used, from the postcard to the poster, reference means of communication in the public or private domains. That series of the same image enable a conversation to begin that we can nevertheless butt into. That there is no precise place; that time is not fixed. And especially that these odd characteristics offer multiple resonances that elude consensus.”
Annick Blavier
By Caroline Lamarche, writer, 2006
Exhibition Annick Blavier, Noëlle Koning, Robert Kot, Maison de la Culture de Namur
“‘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.”
