MAËLLE LEDAUPHIN

It would be easy to dismiss Maëlle Ledauphin's work as the heir to a feminine surrealism that takes up the torch of the strange, the dreamlike, the mysterious and the sexual. But there's no denying that his work is part of this tradition. After all, everything in his visual language refers to it. We are first struck by what we don't understand about his images. I say images As I often do for things that evoke a certain historical background for me, and here it's our shared Western culture that jumps out at me: the fantastic imagination of the Middle Ages. It's as if Maëlle Ledauphin knows how to articulate the marvellous, leaving bits and pieces of her personal (and especially sexual) life to invent a kind of factory of astonishment. That's what happens. On the contrary, she is fully in tune with what she receives from the World, awake as we say today. And as there is of course no contemporary subject but only contemporary ways of grasping the World, Maëlle Ledauphin does what she can with the images that emerge and those that she constructs with great documentation. Oh no! Don't make the mistake of talking about an unconscious! No! She's far too present in her work, far too clever, far too central to what she's constructing. She's very clear, there's no automatic or mediumistic experience here. She tells me how much she likes "the irruption of the popular into the scholarly".

And then there's the medium, that unglamorous oil pastel, so difficult to get out of a school or child's practice. It's an imprecise material to draw with, a stiff material to paint with, yet it's often the one she uses to define her world, which leaves no glimmer, no shadow outside a certain realism. It's clear, almost a little didactic in its clarity of signs, like a Magritte or a school poster studying the anatomy of a flower. There's none of the fuzziness of a whimsical painting, none of the fog of the brushstroke, everything is kept in its place, with strength and delicacy, making his pastels radical demonstrations of his skills and, indeed, of his "realism". re-presentation. 

So, if you like, you can read his paintings and laugh. We often laugh when we look at his paintings. We hear Topor's laughter mingling with our own. This laughter is sometimes serious, sometimes a little embarrassed, always clever because it does not impose itself. The viewer is astonished to be confronted with so much freedom without the militancy of today. It's his frankness, it's astonishing how frank he still is today.

As I've been lucky enough to know her and share a moment in her development, I also know from Maëlle Ledauphin how she sometimes doubts, how she always works hard, how she doesn't want to fall into the trap of a woman's art. She doesn't need that kind of affirmation. She's far too free. That's certainly what's most daring about her, this total indifference to certain battles. Maëlle Ledauphin is totally free, under a sky of her own choosing. She does not confuse her pictorial world with reality. She takes no revenge on the latter. She is not afraid, and this does not produce any impudence about enjoyment or gender confusion. What it does do is create a universal into which everyone, caught up in their own imaginations, can plunge. A portal novel of sorts, a Persian miniature, an Aztec pyramid, a gay pornographic magazine, a codex, and in the end almost never shared dreams. Admittedly, she will be able to decipher a little of her world with the tip of her finger or the edge of her lips. But don't expect the childlike, symbolic descriptions of Louise Bourgeois. As she likes to say: "I always start from a subject". And that's where the danger lies. Be careful. Be careful.

David Liaudet