CHRONOPHOBIA
Imagine that you are so preoccupied with the passage of time and the inexorable fate of your existence, to the point of being obsessed, obsessed, even terrified!
So what would you do with your present, your memories, the time spent with your friends or your family? What cathartic substitutes could you imagine to counterbalance this fear of time passing, this chronophobia as the medical literature calls it?
I am not qualified enough to say that Anaïs Prouzet suffers from chronophobia but I am beginning to know and understand her artistic work well enough to certify that it is haunted by the notion of the disappearance of time and everything that exists. then drama. If certain artistic works are constructed in absence (loss of a loved one, absence of a parent, etc.), that of Anaïs is done in presence. The presence of his loved ones, so important that their absence would be unbearable. But this absence has not yet arrived. It is therefore not a work of loss, but a work of prefiguration, of anticipation. With the aim that her paintings and her moments of joy survive her, Anaïs Prouzet paints in oil, attaching great importance to the materials used and respecting the drying times between two layers. If one layer of paint is passed too quickly on another, the paint cracks, disintegrates and it is a memory that fades, that disappears. Anaïs paints her family, her loved ones, her friends, in order to freeze a moment and an emotion that is too fleeting. In a fairly classic tradition, she paints to fix on the canvas people and moments that will survive her. Her paintings where she embraces her family or friends are ways of giving herself extra time, of making this memory last. On her paintings, we see a myriad of people (some recognizable from one painting to another such as her husband or her brother) almost all the time with their eyes closed and in positions of waiting or contemplation, between sadness and/ or passivity. A female character holds her head in front of birthday cakes. Is she crying, is she making a wish? Is she terrified by this symbol of the passing years?
Motherhood, ecological disaster, death, the loss of loved ones, the passage of time and moments of joy... Anaïs Prouzet's work is crossed by these concerns. The question of good conduct (see the title Deserve your sky), of the good deed, is also important. This is not so much a moral question as an ethical question. In a politically and economically complex, ecologically distressing and health-disarming period, how can we behave well? What does it mean to be a good person today when sometimes completely contradictory injunctions come to us from all sides? Anaïs Prouzet asks herself the questions of her generation and probably those of all generations to come. In this, his painting is resolutely contemporary. She uses realistic painting techniques, certainly ancestral, but in the service of today's concerns. This is why his painting is universal and not the simple artistic transposition of a family album and personal neuroses. The point here is to invent a new story in line with the paradigms of the time, and if possible to influence the continuation of this story, to no longer be just a spectator. Another sign of an era, the reference to the French rapper Orelsan, which we perceive through details or in a portrait. Certain artists/singers/musicians are now so present in our lives that sometimes they are particularly close to us, almost familiar.
In this universe populated by diverse characters, nothing is embellished, there is no aestheticization of the world, just reality in all its rawest form. But this reality is still put to the test by the framing and cutting of the paintings. Indeed, in many of her works, Anaïs Prouzet breaks up the scenes or blurs them. In the series of charcoal drawings Maxima where we see two people kissing, the scene appears as if in the reflection of a foggy bathroom mirror. Some areas are blurry, hidden by fog, and others are very clear, as if a hand had rubbed the surface of a mirror after a hot shower. In works from an earlier series, one could even read, or guess words written with a finger in this mist, like those left between lovers between two baths. No wonder that fogging, an extremely fleeting and fragile physical phenomenon, interests the artist. The fog hides and reveals things, but above all it covers reality with a vaporous veil and suspends time. When it reveals the mouths and hands of a kissing couple, we move here from an optical phenomenon to a poetic phenomenon. It’s a clarification, in the sense of “let’s get things straightened out once and for all”: love is the essential thing here! The rest is superfluous (superfluous?). In the artist's paintings, there is no blur, but we see a fragmentation of the scenes. On the same canvas, we can guess several parts, several narrations which, placed side by side, compose an overall scenario. This division of the canvas is done by bands (horizontal or vertical) or by indistinct, more organic shapes. The characters therefore seem to be in different distinct spaces but yet something always ends up connecting them. These divisions are not perfect and a character can extend from one area to another. Despite the fact that they are separate, they are all united on the same canvas and complement each other. As if to better tell us that in our individuality, we are ultimately nothing without others. In Tell me what I don't want to know, the calm, almost sunny attitude of the central character contrasts with the circumspect gaze of the one on the right and with the introspection of the one on the left.
When the scene is not broken up, we can see the character appear several times, from several angles as if he were ready to discuss with himself, to ask questions. This technique can remind us of the beginnings of photography and in particular the superpositions of exposures on the same film which shows the same character several times in the same image. Anaïs Prouzet's painting is in any case full of references to the history of art (notably the history of painting) and to cultural history in general. We can find in his paintings feet taken from Victorious Love painted by Caravaggio around 1601 or another from The birth of Venus made by Botticelli around 1484. These “historical” feet mix with others from our time (I cannot help but analyze the numerous presence and the significant importance of the feet in the work of Anaïs Prouzet as a relationship to reality. The feet are what connects us to the ground, to the earth. To represent feet is to have "one's feet on the ground", it is not to hide one's face or run away from one's responsibilities). We can also guess references to Dali and Gala without forgetting tones from impressionism or framing inspired by the Renaissance. Titles also have great importance and can direct the viewer to what led the artist to create the work. We find verses taken from songs (rap in particular) and aphorisms almost reminiscent of Haiku. We can also guess here the importance of literature or at least the meaning of words. Anaïs Prouzet's works are talkative in the sense that they are full of details and references.
In addition to the direct or indirect references to the history of art, we could almost “push” by saying that Anaïs’s painting has an obvious connection with the pictorial tradition of “Memento Mori”. This Latin phrase, which means “remember that you are dying” or “remember that you are going to die”, expresses the vanity of earthly life. This vision of the human condition has given rise, throughout the ages, to numerous artistic representations. In the 17th century, a style of still life called Vanitas (vanities) will push the Memento Mori fashion to its peak. In these works, symbols of mortality (skulls, skeleton, etc.) are placed in opposition to symbols of beauty or the passing of time (fading flowers, spinning wheel, hourglass, etc.) in order to better remind us of our inevitable funeral destiny. But the art of dying is in fact an art of living. These works encourage us to enjoy life and finally focus on the essentials to forget the superfluous. And this is what Anaïs Prouzet invites us to do through her reflections on family, friends, the passing of time, and future disappearances. It is thus located at the end of a long artistic lineage which encourages us to live and savor each moment so as not to have regrets.
That being said, it is difficult to be tormented by the passing of time, make it the center of one's work and not be subject to melancholy. But, from Baudelairian spleen, to a very contemporary treatment of depression, melancholy is an emotion whose poetic and aesthetic significance has continued to be explored. There is, moreover, a real beauty in spleen and melancholy. A sort of slowing down of things, a rapture of the inevitable. I am very sorry to have successively treated Anaïs Prouzet as chronophobic and then as melancholic, in a medical impulse that borders on counter psychology. I would also like to be able to say that we must separate the woman from the artist, but in this case, that is not the case. Anaïs' work is closely linked to her vision of the world and things. The numerous self-portraits she makes and the works where she portrays herself with other people confirm this to us. We have known since Antiquity that a self-portrait is only the symbolization of what the artist wants us to think of him. It is a staging, a representation. Anaïs' self-portraits, on the contrary, seem surprisingly frank and faithful. Our era, conducive to selfies and the perpetual presentation of oneself on social networks, favors a society of symbolic representation where the instantaneous is essential. A selfie is replaced in a second by another in the newsfeed of our phones, just as a thought and an emotion are swept away in a matter of moments in the newsfeed of our overworked thoughts. It is not nothing, following this observation, to say that Anaïs Prouzet works for eternity, so that in her paintings, her thoughts, her loved ones, her love survive her.
Alexandre Roccuzzo, art historian
Montluçon, October 2023
POINT OF VIEW
Against time – 2022
In her drawings, Anaïs Prouzet strives to transcribe life experiences that she transcends through her practice of portraiture: her closest circle is her most immediate inspiration. Behind these intimate protagonists, we guess a form of melancholy confronted with an almost allusive vision of love, death and happiness. Much more than the incarnation of a memory or a memorial work, Anaïs Prouzet tends to immortalize the present by all means: these faces and these bodies, drawn in charcoal, appear as witnesses of life and bring out the beauty of the living without trying to idealize reality. The artist comments on this and tells us: “My main challenge lies directly in the subjects that I choose to represent. It's about making them as strong and important as they are in life. Without idealizing a reality that may seem ordinary, there is an absolute need to illuminate and freeze these times of life shared with loved ones that are far from ordinary. »
Indeed, the artistic approach of Anaïs Prouzet disputes the notion of “eternal” and affirms that happiness and melancholy ultimately go hand in hand.
MAINTENANCE
by Catherine Robet – 2020
Catherine Robert: From your first drawings, where you represented yourself as a child, you voluntarily sought to involve the viewer as a witness to the particularly strong scenes that you drew. By evoking harassment for example, or falsely innocent cruelty, part of your work reminded me of that of an artist like Jérôme Zonder. What do you think ?
Anais Prouzet: I discovered the work of Jérôme Zonder during my studies at the Beaux-Arts. I was immediately attracted by his graphic line but especially by his subjects which in certain aspects echoed my memories of adolescence. The ruthless world of children and teenagers that made me become the person I am today, very sensitive, solitary, suspicious... Naturally, without having thought about it too much at the time, my memories of adolescence have was my exclusive creative engine when I started to draw: scenes between reality and fiction, very charged, teeming with details with allusions to those and especially those who had done me a lot of harm. A practice of drawing as an outlet but without any anger. The various graphic lines of Zonder, both drawings borrowed from a child's line and those very realistic and mature of an adult, reminded me of the extent to which children use adult gestures without really mastering them but knowing perfectly well what that it can cause.
It is on this parallel that I began to imagine the scenes of my drawings.
Catherine Robert: Between the large drawing "Strike, kill the strike, split it in two" from 2018 and your two three-quarter portraits from 2019, which are like a memory of a portrait (and which personally strongly evokes the figure of the character of Agathe in André Dhôtel's book "The Unknown Road"), I seem to see a change in approach. What does this evolution correspond to?
Anais Prouzet: At the end of 2018, a gallery owner challenged me about my work at the time, which was exclusively oriented around my childhood memories, where we repeatedly saw little girls wearing my face hurting themselves. His blunt perspective left me both confused and stunned. This conversation gave me the perspective I needed on my work. These two drawings of which you speak are the first two that I made following this meeting. I no longer saw the importance of using my face to such an extent to embody the victims and executioners in my drawings. From that day on, I began to show who I am today both in the shadows and in the light, with all the same a slight gaze turned towards the past, a very small one, because I don't forget nothing.
Catherine Robert: When you spoke to me about your work, you notably quoted a sentence from Francis Bacon: “Strength must be frozen in the subject”. What does this mean to you ?
Anais Prouzet: I really like this sentence because it represents exactly what is most important to me today. I draw and I paint my loved ones, the man I love, my mom, my little brother and my friends. I'm often told that the only thing that lasts once you're gone is art. This strength, this love that I have for them must absolutely subsist in the drawing or painting that represents them, otherwise what's the point.
Catherine Robert : Why and how, last year, when your favorite tool was charcoal, graphite or quite simply pencil, did painting burst into your work?
Anais Prouzet: Painting has always fascinated me but for me it was a complex medium. I thought drawing basics were essential and I hadn't drawn enough yet! After my studies, it was a trip to Italy, but above all my meeting with Caravaggio's “Victorious Love” at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin that ignited my desire to paint. It was then that I contacted Axel Pahlavi, an immense painter whose work I had been following since 2013. I met him at the end of 2018 in his Berlin studio. A beautiful encounter that led me to discover painting the following year with him and his wife Florence Obrecht, whose work is just as remarkable. By living this transmission, this suspended time, I felt lucky to paint every day for hours in their studio. This technique was unknown to me but nevertheless, this tool was familiar to me as if I had already practiced it in my thoughts. Painting was like an electric shock, something visceral that grips the guts. It is since this experience in Berlin that my work shifted towards different subjects and that the color revealed all the possibilities that I do not obtain in drawing even if I like to pass from one to another. .