Expositions 2024

A Lifetime of Regrets

Whether they were made with pen or brush, in an almost ascetic sobriety or a manic explosion of detail, spread out in thick, rough paste or diluted in wild washes, Gwendoline Desnoyers' drawings and paintings draw on many artistic movements of the 20th century to map out a two-dimensional poetic space made up of a set of signs that demand to be decoded.

These riddles, staged without any perspective or vanishing line, reveal a realm from which there is no escape unless the key is found. Confronted with the opaque veil that separates appearances from their truths, Gwendoline Desnoyers's visual works and poems are amulets designed to ward off a premature disappearance and invoke an illumination that has been forever delayed.

These works ring out like strange prayers, filled with the wonder of makeshift symbolism or sleepwalking dreams: houses with shutters closed but doors always open, gods looking like sad tigers, gardens of colourful palms and austere columns, male silhouettes with streamlined outlines, peaceful flayed figures sheltering a fragile bird, accomplices with hazy identities...

 Reminiscences of pallid memories that we didn't really live through and that we have to tell to believe in. From this Russian doll paper memory, ghostly images feed a buzzing brain like a thousand orphaned bees on a stormy night. Hence the grey of these paintings, perhaps. A deep grey that is not quite the same as before the light or after dark. It is an uncertain time, ready to fade or burn out, the promise of a world on the edge, with Gwendoline Desnoyers as a tightrope walker.

 Thus we wonder whether it's a life of regret we're talking about, or the regret of living far from that world, where everything seems still probable, not quite begun and not about to end, forever on the threshold. That world is ours.

 Born in 1990, Gwendoline Desnoyers passed away in 2020 and will forever be a 29-year-old artist. Une vie de Regrets, published by Éditions Arbitraire in 2023, is the first collection of her enigmatic, visionary work.

Translation : Éric Moreau