myrtille béal

To meet Myrtille Beal is to be surprised by her look 

“We could well imagine a workshop where scraps of fabric in cotton, velvet, satin, taffeta, tulle or veil and rags, curtains, pants, dresses, jackets and other clothes are collected…

We can imagine drawers filled pell-mell with buttons, pearls, feathers, ribbons, croquets, lace and also doilies, bias binding, belt buckles, sequins as if coming from a busy haberdashery of fight …

We might as well suppose to find somewhere in a corner gloves, orphaned gloves, hats having lost their head, scarves, furs, linings, ties, spools of thread, balls of wool, tangled balls left behind. on account…

However, in all this chaos, we will never count any raccoons.

We don't really know what they would do there.

On the other hand, we will certainly find moths or rather myths there without a doubt!

And so this is where everything can begin.

In this joyfully labyrinthine and perilous hustle and bustle, Myrtille Béal ventures and pulls her thread, unravels the enigmas, deconstructs the stories to construct others in which she will feature her creatures.

So, meeting Myrtille Béal means being surprised by her look.

It almost has the limpidity of the first look at the first morning, a look wide open to the surroundings and which goes well beyond to somewhere else, a look which curiously examines "the other thing", off-camera.

She is between the gentleness and the brutality of the things offered to the world and when we approach her characters with a smile on our lips, the next time, we are no longer reassured at all... A shiver slides down our spine because it allows us to see differently.

Myrtille Béal takes a certain look at things in life, she shakes up both small habits and big rituals, she shakes up Freudian, Lacanian and other archetypes that prevent people from going around in circles and puts things back on the table. divan the inextricable world of impulses and what she defines as “animality” which, for her, is “something overflowing, beyond or below the human, something dripping”.

From these fabulous stories, theater of gods, demiurges, heroes, animals, hybrids symbolizing natural forces, demonic powers, instinctive energies and passionate impulses, Myrtille Béal leads the game and offers an astonishing approach to certain fundamentals of the world and the society which forged or which conveys these myths.

Ostentatious signs and other attributes are exhibited, without fear and without any reproach, since the bearers do not take themselves too seriously! However, they take what they imply very seriously.

And even though they are silent and tight-lipped, they say a lot...

However, for them it is not a question of denouncing but rather of offering the possibility of other relationships to the world, where everyone can try to solve the enigma or reformulate the answer into a new question.

His sculptures are the characters of a theater cut from raw. Myrtille Béal brilliantly orchestrates the most singular facets of the human condition, the grandeur and decadence of a humanity that seeks itself on the borders of desire and torment.

Then, her work suddenly takes on an almost sacred dimension in the face of Creation, she recreates, or rather, she repairs.

A sort of strange carnivalesque Tikkoun olam, if we can risk this expression!

A repair of the world where the pieces of glass from the Judaic tradition are exchanged for pieces of multicolored fabric which enchant the entire spectrum of light.

And if it is man's responsibility to repair the world, the artist is then a chosen actor.

Myrtille Béal works on what constitutes us at the heart of our existence; what we do, undo, knit, unravel from thread to needle over time to be in the world rather than waiting for a lost paradise.

Repairing the world therefore requires thoroughness and attention.

This meticulousness is found in the gestures of assembling, sewing, embroidering and the attention arises in the precaution taken with all these worked materials, whether they are soft, rough, heavy or vaporous.

At this point of creation, we suppose something voluptuous, at the heart of the action it can be guessed! The pleasure of fingers tapping on the fabric to give birth to creatures of love ballads, dances of death and other wild waltzes.

We can also suspect that it is they who sometimes lead the way and lead Myrtille Béal off the beaten track, just like this “fabric angel with a dress made from “Papa”’s ties”…

Just to delight us or worry us!

And if, as Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, let us imagine Sisyphus rolling a shimmering stone, filled with feathers, sewn and embroidered by Myrtille Béal..."

Isabelle Schmitt-Liseron, March 2019