WINNER CARRÉ SUR SEINE 2019

For Françoise Vanneraud, drawing is not a small personal affair, but a research concerning the very structure of the living, which is moving. Produced by hand, it is a producer of reality, and emancipates itself from who holds the pencil, a force that goes, knowing without master.

Françoise Vanneraud's drawings are expanding planets, first placed on walls, or on any space not afraid to receive them, before proliferating without restraint, transforming themselves into volumes, new concretions, geological oddities, fetishes hitherto unknown.

The line becomes an object, black and white becomes colour, the almost nothing becomes an almost everything, without us really knowing, after a few minutes of contemplation, who generates who.
Leaving the drawing to embrace volume, or abandoning the object to enter a cosmos of strokes that has its own laws of depth, the eye drags the mind that drags the body that drags the tilting of spaces and reigns.
Ferns, glaciers, rocks, stars, a fundamental night.

There is no doubt that the world into which the gaze penetrates is a world that was first, before the catastrophes, or of refoundation, after some major destruction that has erased its last inhabitants from the surface of the Earth.
Silent, Françoise Vanneraud's landscapes nevertheless rustle with words to come, considerable, prophetic, like the gathered cry of orphans leaving their hermitage for a few moments to invent the concert of new times.
The setting sets the conditions for its overflowing, dry window swept away by the waters of the sublime, in these working hours when the artist no longer fears being a German romantic lost in the labyrinth of an asphyxiated present.

The frontier is a bitter one, which allows the navigator to avoid sinking, the walker to establish lines of perspective, and to give himself the illusion of being one of the vanishing points of an endless territory.
A character advances, alone, intimidated, fearing first of all to disturb the peace of the place. He picks up a pebble, holds it in his hand for a few moments, fist closed, fist outstretched, feeling deeply the bite of his roughness.
In an iconoclastic gesture, he suddenly throws it violently against the drawing, which immediately absorbs it in a shower of strokes and integrates it into the overall composition.

The vandal turns around, embarrassed, revealed, then opens the door of the gallery he had entered. He walks away.
There, up there, in the distance so close to Françoise Vanneraud's imaginary off-world, the shadows move, playful and powerful, waiting for other experiences to make a feast of them.

By Fabien Ribery