jacqueline devreux

BORDER BEINGS, GUARDIANS AND FREAK TOTEMS

by Véronique Bergen.

Alongside painting, drawing and photography, the artist Jacqueline Devreux explores sculpture in a gesture of continuity and rupture with regard to her previous creations. Continuity in the motifs, the hauntings, the unconscious scenes, the figures but rupture in the aesthetic breath and the arrangement of the imagination. I see there a passage in the sense of an initiatory passage, a digging of possibilities, a play of forms in three dimensions as if to ward off, compensate for the failure of a world that has lost one of its dimensions.

The people of figures that welcome us compose a theater of life and death, an alphabet of effigies, dolls, totems that stand guard and watch over us. The tribes that Jacqueline Devreux frees are intimate and extimate, political and poetic. Counterweight to the futuristic concretions of transhumans, to their Promethean ideology, to their cult of artifice and GMOs, the artist's sculptures materialize an animist universe, incarnate spirits, goldsmiths of the passages between worlds, dancers of the infinite plucked from the assumption of finitude. "Boxer, music lover, singer", "Geisha", "Sorcerer", "Justice", "The guardian", "Marcel", "Femen and black girlsweb", "The child of the heart", "Dog cow"... the actors and actresses of this theater which is a mixture of voodoo, vaudeville and trance think and heal the humans of whom they are doubles, extensions, mirrors.

Working on the lines that separate the organic from the inorganic, the animate from the inanimate, these figures, often posed or sunk into bases, isolated or in groups, filiform or more compact, have the virtue of challenging us, of harpooning us, launching their tribal grammar, their urban jungle mysteries. Humor and impertinence of the absurd, play on forms, scales and signifiers (the rapper with a rapier head), face reduced to a raw surface, head without eyes, pierced by a mouth, body which, if it is not headless, is crowned by an object face: Jacqueline Devreux makes a body, recomposes a body, gives it form and soul from different materials, wool, fabrics, papier-mâché. The wool and cotton threads represent the nerves, the influxes, the waves and allow a being to hold on, to hold firm, to stand up in being, to brave the storms. The experience that we are given to live is that of a ritual framed by the doors of life and death, by the joyful ceremony of nativity and funeral farewell. Of light or heavier consistency, colored or mummified in white, the shamanic sculptures act as amulets, mischievous gris-gris from the lands of childhood, from African tribal statuary, from the cycle of mourning and rebirth.

Artists who, in the field of contemporary art, have devoted themselves to doll sculptures have often chosen this toy that they deterritorialize and catapult into the space of art in order to subvert norms, taboos, to question the invariants of the human condition. We will think of Hans Bellmer, Lotte Pritzel, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taueber, Emmy Hennings, more recently Niki de Saint-Phalle and her nanas, Cindy Sherman, Michel Nedjar, Marianne Berenhaut, Melissa Ichiuji… In wool, recycled fabrics, rags, papier-mâché, decorated with shells, feathers, Jacqueline Devreux's dolls carry within them a poetry of materials in which private and collective mental images are projected. Self-portraits rub shoulders with layers of memories and are familiar with childhood stories. Great travelers, these magical effigies, sometimes soft, sometimes hardened, go back in time, the mud of centuries. Sisters of ritual dolls, comforters, transitional objects, they soothe pain, fears, smooth trauma, terrors, remind us of the missing, dialogue with the absent, probe, via the archaic, the contemporary with irreverence.

Every doll is a fetish. A fetish radiating a secret memory and emotional charge, plotting white magic or black magic, dethroning its creator. Crossed hands, protruding breasts, richly adorned or displaying their nudity, sexually marked or mutant beings, nativity scene of queens of magi or mad madonnas, gallery of freaks, zoo of curiosities, Siamese puppets, little mermaid of Brussels with flamboyant red lipstick, acrobat exhibiting the sex of the origin and the end of the world, mask-face, shamelessness of the ship of fools, wild carnival of the strange, woman-trunk, Lynch in the land of marabouts, grimacing or extravagant ex-votos… these protective figures slalom between humans and non-humans, between the here below and the beyond. Being of borders, the doll is anthropomorphic (to varying degrees) and simulacrum. From the earth, fabrics, and scraps, the artist creates another body, little gods, golems that travel in another space-time. Sewing a body, sewing its wounds, infusing it with voodoo energy, rock energy, is to contribute to the genesis of doubles, to stick one's ear to the tremors of the mythical. Freud's reel, his "fort-da" here becomes a reel of thread that is wound in order to generate the existent. These primitive, votive, original figures that recreate anatomy anew, that permute the syntax of organs, are receptacles of affects, impulses, concretions of the unconscious. More than an intercessor, than a medium catalyzing catharsis, they catharsize by their presence, countering the mouths of shadow. Their intuitive knowledge is that of metamorphoses, mutations in valences, conversions of dark energies into counter-nihilism. In their wake, the question of the specular arises, the rhizome of the links between doll-maternity-night of instincts-childhood-game-survival. Whether archetypal or individualized, Jacqueline Devreux's totem sculptures are endowed with a power of action on reality, with a hypnotic power. Multi-sensory entities, they accompany the passers-by that we are, undo the defeat, their toothed mouths whispering truths that knock and dismast appearances. Among their missions? To raise the ruin, to offer residence to animal lights, to erect a sanctuary of eccentric jubilation, not to make a pact with the abandonment of oneself, of the other. Their bodies of cotton, of feathers scream that they are matrices of forces, spaces inhabited by the religious, the political, the cosmic: without belonging to the "aesthetics of care", it is by creating an opera of intensities that they restore the wounded and scratch the emblems of authority, the pettiness of the objective spirit of the time. "Let's dance. Put on your red shoes and dance de blues", David Bowie.