« These things arrived from my Grandmother, they make me think about where I fit in the odd geometry of time… » *
This is how Francesca Woodman described the objects represented in the original photographs that she glued and subtitled by hand, which make up the unique work published during her lifetime. In fact, a few days before her suicide, January 19, 1981, her first book came to light. It is an artist’s book of 500 editions, an idea that came to her during a trip to Rome and her discovery of the Maldoror bookstore. There, she bought five old Italian exercise workbooks. One of them, devoted to geometry (particularly to Elucid’s theorem), became the basis of this first pamphlet whose hand-written title speaks volumes to her clairvoyance: Some Disordered Interior Geometries.
She was twenty-two; she was fully aware of the disorder that drove her. She looked for her place, almost greedily, by using almost exclusively her body in her photos. “Like this, I’m always available,” she explains, when the urgency of representation appears.
The decrepitude of the interiors, the mirrors that let one see the dark side of things, the nooks and crannies make up the framework of these performances where bodies evolve, strange and ghost-like, in order to maintain the most intimate of links with the camera.
Could she be an angel?
The question nagged at her. She regularly came back to it; an invisible creature, weightless, without problems of space or language, was perhaps the solution. This young prodigy, still young, free, and the embodiment of a slightly demonic angel implemented ephemeral photographic feats, which were borderline visible. This is also the judiciously chosen angle by Anna Tellgren, curator of the exhibition, to carefully address the Francesca Woodman work, On Being an Angel, referencing, even in her expression, to a process.
It is a possible response to the initial question about the geometry of time and the final and premature disappearance of the artist, a sort of somber accomplishment.
Agnès Sire, Directrice Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
* These things arrived from my grandmothers they make me think about where I fit in this odd geometry of time. Francesca Woodman in Some Disordered Interior Geometries, Synapse Press Philadelphia, 1981, p. 6-7.
EXHIBITION
On Being an Angel
Francesca Woodman
From May 11th to July 31st, 2016
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
2 Impasse Lebouis
75014 Paris
France
http://www.henricartierbresson.org
BOOK
Francesca Woodman : Devenir un ange
Xavier Barral
Texts by : Agnès Sire
Anna Tellgren
Anna-Karin Palm
George Woodman
Relié
17 x 23,5 cm
232 pages
103 B&W photographs
ISBN : 978-2-36511-096-9
35€
http://exb.fr
