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Bodies' impulses, outstretched hands, attempts at embraces: these paintings show us characters eager to enter "into resonance with the world". According to this idea dear to the philosopher Hartmut Rosa, they are both animated by an impulse towards the world and others, but also reciprocally disposed to be touched by them, open to what they see, what they hear, what they feel.
Contact, in the intensity of our friendships and our desires.
Contact of the immersed body which rediscovers nature.
Stimulating, sensual, intellectual contact in the experience of art.
Contact between the artist's body and the canvas.
Contacts, as many paths to better inhabit and warm our existences.
By choosing to paint the bonds of intimacy, moments of contemplation and introspection, the love of music and painting, Chloé Tiravy defends "that which is priceless". Faced with the "desensitization" of our societies, denounced by the thinker Annie Le Brun, these figures haloed with pigment watch over our passions: guardians of our capacity to be moved, sentinels of the sensitive.
Jérémy Liron, literary patron of this exhibition, writes:
"Chloé Tiravy looks at the world not by aiming at its motif as if to seize it or dominate it, but almost by closing her eyes, and by freeing herself from this predatory violence to the point of participating, as if blind, disarmed, forgetting all knowledge, in the invisible totality of everything. It is not a question of capturing but of receiving, of bearing witness to the world, not of wanting oneself before it, but of forgetting oneself so that it may come about."
In these large choreographic compositions, marked by Renaissance and Mannerist painting, the bright colours seem tempered by the reign of a more anxious silence: "Chloé Tiravy offers her loved ones to play obscure roles in her paintings, whose presence then hangs on the threshold of an eloquent silence. Floating around them are memories of Pasolini's films... The protagonists of the canvas Noise inside recall to memory The Visitation Pontormo stretched and dramatized in The Greeting by Bill Viola. », notes Jérémy Liron. “You move forward along these paintings as if through a strange dream. It seems to you, with Baudelaire, that you are winding through a temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words, forests of symbols observing you with familiar glances.
“Like long echoes that merge from afar
In a dark and deep unity,
Vast as the night and as the light,
Scents, colors and sounds respond to each other. »
Despite the deeply melancholic gaze of the card players, despite this self-portrait lying with its back to us, it is indeed the philia, this love-friendship defined by the Greeks, which seems to be for the artist the starting point of a re-enchantment of the world. philia, or friendship, conceived as the power to rejoice in loving, as a force allowing us to exist more, and to exist better.
Chloé Tiravy defines herself as a generous painting, and defends her right for feeling, poetry, and narration.
Her practice, which takes place on her studio, but also in situ, is embodied in large format canvases painted in oil. This sometimes monumental approach to painting finds a counterweight in an intimate practice of portraiture and self-portraiture, which she develops in parallel.
Far from a cold restitution of nature or social space, her paintings show us the representation of an inner truth: a realism of feelings and movements of the psyche. Landscapes, beings, and colors are modified by the inner eye; the still visible pieces undergo a distortion by the powerful effect of intimate sensations.
But the painting is, above all, the place of a reflection on the painting itself, which offers itself to the spectator in the truth of its elaboration, and allows us to see the different temporalities of its construction, such as: the liquid lines of preparatory drawing, the first transparent paint drips, and the still visible pieces of squaring; all mixed on the same surface with bodies with a more assertive realism. An appropriate synergy between finished and unfinished elements establishes the balance of her compositions.
Engaged by the strength of color in painting, Chloé plays with the implementation of its intensity, light, and saturation, as well as its impact and spillover on form and the drawn line. Flat colors and gestures accompany and shakes the figures in space. The border between figuration and abstraction becomes more and more thin, allowing to reanalyze the intertwining of the body and the landscape, going against a simple juxtaposition, and working on the balance of power of these two elements.
The experience of loneliness, the restoration of dignity, the attempt of reconciliation between humans and their environment, are the humanist issues of these paintings, both contemporary and romantic.