Aurélie Romanacce

Editor of the magazine L'Oeil

 

 

 

 

 

Think about words or think about evils

(April 2018)

 

 

 

Virginie Hucher rubs life with paint. The abstraction of the series of choreographed bodies - body postures synthesized to the extreme in the form of colored geometric volumes - has since given way to imposed figures. The appearance of figuration if it seems sudden, was nonetheless present from the Choreographed Bodies but retained the modesty of young girls in bloom by preferring to disappear under the tension exerted by complementary or opposite forms. Could the fragmented spheres, volumes disemboweled in search of their complementarity be an allegory of the myth of Aristophanes of the Banquet of Plato?

“The men presented the round shape; their backs and ribs were arranged in a circle, four arms, four legs, two faces attached to a round neck, and perfectly similar; a single head which united these two faces opposite one another; four ears, two sexes, and the rest in the same proportion. […] When they wanted to go faster, they leaned successively on their eight limbs, and advanced quickly in a circular movement, like those who, feet in the air, make the wheel. ”

The geometric forms of the Choreographed Bodies amputated from their soul mate, seem incapable of incarnating, and seem to await the moment when their identity takes shape. In a subliminal way, this series announces the figurative androgyny of the imposed Figures. Against an abysmally deep black background stands out a series of self-portraits with anxious introspection. The character half-man, half-woman twists in all directions in search of his own self. From microcosm to macrocosm, there is only one step that Virginie Hucher hastens to take by associating the big bang of emotions with the chaos of the cosmos.

The new painting series in progress, by bringing into being two twin characters, redoubled the theme of the ego in an assumed androgyny. Identical characters sometimes look at each other, confront each other or ignore each other and go beyond the framework assigned to them. The double of the mirror takes on its full meaning here and the vacuum glass bells freeze a hypothetical future over time. For the first time, the transhumanism of the characters is accompanied by hybrid and fantastic vegetation, at the edge of the cabinet of curiosity and botanical manipulations. The plants creep onto the canvas, bud, bloom and offer breathing to these caged individuals, in search of themselves.

"A third way is possible, that of Tao," Virginie Hucher seems to tell us. By integrating a lively and slender flora, the artist's painting unites man and nature in a new holistic destiny. After the series of side effects photographs where Virginie Hucher, imprisoned in an impossible moult, had to learn to free herself from her origins to be born a second time, the paintings in progress open onto an elsewhere of reconciliation. The colors become pastels, the eyes meet, the lips come together to soon merge and find for a moment the lost feeling of eternity?