Agnès Pezeu

Born 1969 in France, she lives and works in the Paris area.  

 
Your body and your history become mine

“Your body is my partner.” This is something Agnès Pezeu might say. A body, a human body, approached by this French artist in a way that is sensitive, vibrant, and embodied – rather than figurative. The aim is not so much to produce an image as to apprehend an energy, the energy of life itself, which her painting seeks to metaphorically capture and celebrate.
The art Agnès Pezeu began to produce in the 1990s was generous. Whether painting, sculpture or installation, it embodied a taste for the elementary (installations in water, wrapping objects in tinfoil) combined with a sense of refinement. Her works are shown in Paris and New York (nine5 Gallery). It was in 2007 that she first experimented in public with the method of representing the human body that has become her signature. She laid a canvas covered with acrylic paint on the ground and invited anyone so inclined to pose, lying down on the canvas, while she told them a story from the Classical Age, whether the Brothers Grimm or Perrault. The experience can be tried clothed or naked, alone or with another person. Each person freely defines their posture, in accordance with their reaction to the artist’s tale. Using a dark pastel crayon, Pezeu then traces the ephemeral outline of the reclining person, in order to create a graphic representation of their short-lived posture. The resulting canvas is then pinned up vertically on a picture wall in the venue. In this way, Pezeu develops a privileged relation between herself, as the painter who proposes, and a model, who decides, and plays his or her own score.

For the festival, Pezeu’s Journal d’un corps franc invokes the figure of her grandfather, who died at the end of the Second World War, by referring to his journal, which “comprises excerpts from several travel notebooks that my grandfather kept between August and November 1944, over the four months before his death. These pages are the testimony of a man and his own particular way of living the war, immersed in a Pétainist family and forced to flee out of fear of the partisans. This flight turned out to be the richest adventure of his life, and provided an unhoped-for moment of perspective.” As Pezeu adds: “This diary is also a historic account of the state of Southwest France in August 1944. Harassed by the Resistance, German troops were beating a disorderly retreat northwards. The journey made by my ancestor, from the Rhône Valley to the Lot Valley, and then to Paris, where he joined the troops of the Maréchal De Lattre de Tassigny, was anything but a tourist trip with added bombs. This journal bears witness to a crisis and onset of consciousness.”

At the BBB, where she will “act out” this unusual adventure, Pezeu is working with a dancer, whose movements will represent a reactive corporeal response to her grandfather’s story. In this curious theatre, history is not conveyed in the habitual forms of narrative or testimony, but by corporeal stimuli that go beyond them, becoming the equivalent of seismograph, all the way to the cessation of movement (or so we sense) coldly suggested by the hero’s death. “In November 1944, when he volunteered for a reconnaissance mission, he walked into a trap. They called on him to surrender, but he opened fire. The Germans fired back. He was mortally wounded on the head.”