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House of Familiar Ghosts
09.26.08 - 10.19.08
Exhibition — Centre d'art le LAIT

Keen to broaden the map of Le Printemps de Septembre, Christian Bernard has devised the exhibition House of Familiar Ghosts at the Le Lait Art Centre in Castres, the Tarn département's international art laboratory.

 

The presbytery has lost none of its charm, nor the garden its dazzle ”.

 

How can we not remember the strange sentence from Gaston Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room when we venture into the old abode housing this exhibition? In it everything oozes the tranquil nostalgia of provincial retreats. In it we greet familiar ghosts which have been waiting for us to return for light years. These discreet hosts imperceptibly release images which quiver on the walls. Here there is a whole herbarium of purple irises. There a tormented collection of Alpine chalets. Further away stand huge drawings where the light appears to be swallowed up. Does the disquieting gallery of portraits unfurled by these small paintings not list the actors who have haunted this forgotten theatre? Unless they are capturing in real time our most unadmitted fantasies. And these large water colours, are they mirages, memory screens or coded secrets? At the end, the little yellow salon possibly contains the key to this worried parade: barely sketched, the figures which bob to the surface of the pages seem to be teetering miraculously on the edge of their disappearance. So it is with dreams and our lives. (Christian Bernard)