Loire Valley
April 7 – July 1, 2018
Coco Téxèdre
painting, drawing, sculpture
Coco Téxèdre’s Loire Valleys exhibition presents about thirty works: paintings, drawings and sculptures. It is an opportunity to discover her recent work through series that tirelessly return to motifs that have been dear to the artist for years.
Invitation
Exhibition
Presentation
Coco Téxèdre’s Loire Valleys exhibition presents about thirty works: paintings, drawings and sculptures. It is an opportunity to discover her recent work through series that tirelessly return to motifs that have been dear to the artist for years.
Thus, for the series of Memory Panties, work begun in 2011 and that Coco Téxèdre continues today (Château du Rivau, 2018).
From old postcards representing either Joan of Arc or monuments of the region, the artist has drawn like an embroiderer the pattern of the panties. From a distance, she gives the illusion of real embroidery with the usual decorative motifs of lingerie (flowers, leaves, lace).
Up close, we discover either a drawing or words, phrases that make up the pattern, a kind of automatic writing that follows on the paper like a garland of letters. Some lines are also distorted, extending the motif of the postcard, in the center of the drawing.
The artist has fun with codes, historical “monuments”, diverting them, putting femininity back where we do not expect it (castles, monuments to the glory of …). It’s a way of reminding us of the importance and the role of female power throughout history.
A wink to Max Ernst perhaps with a drawing of panties on an old map, such as the body of the woman associated with the river Loire that the artist had realized.
Another aspect of her research are the large canvases exhibited as well as the stratigraphies: on paper – torn pieces accumulated and marouflaged on canvas – the artist works with acrylic, then oil which she then scrapes off, making a motif appear, that of the wild, exuberant grass, which tirelessly pushes back the glyphosates by taking back the rights of mother nature. The one that survives man and culture. Indeed, we also find her paintings of grass on representations of ancient paintings, creating a strong contrast between culture – which is established (she chooses easily recognizable pictorial “values”) – and nature, as if ancient art became a wasteland from which the current artist drew her soil.
Finally, the exhibition will present sculptures: the stratigraphies in question, which take up again at each period of creation of the artist, like core samples, the themes which have inspired her for several years.
Also in a spirit that seems far from the whole, two sculptures in rusted metal (therefore perfect for the outside and conceived as such!) that symbolize the intimate once again, that of the artist. Indeed, like the twirlers which roll in the desert, these agglomerates of twisted metal rods and arranged by the artist by hand, are only the mental representation of flashes, images that Coco Téxèdre undergoes during violent migraines. A powerful artistic gesture that once again plays with codes and reality! Nathalie Béreau, April 2018