VOZ’Galerie, in Boulogne-Billancourt, is exhibiting this French bargain-hunting artist in the burlesque world.
It has been thirty years that, every weekend, Coco Fronsac roams around flea markets in search of old family photos where the vagaries of individual stories are left to the hands of others. Over the years, she has created an ever-renewing collection of old photographic portraits, most often anonymous, dating from the late-19th century and the first half of the 20th century, which she has incorporated with her artistic imagination.
Though their original memory is forever lost, Coco Fronsac gives them a second life through her work. She plays with solemn postures, sometimes hieratic, often stereotypical, that characterize these photos taken for life’s specific structured events (birth, communion, marriage, etc.) and that photographically reflect the norms and decorum of the social trajectories of those times. She has, thus, created an ensemble of series that is both distinguished and entangled in order to constitute the essence of her pictorial work, with evocative titles relative to their questioning of memory and identity: Born Under X, Death Doesn’t Have to Know, Memory Lapses, and many others.
In her most recent series, Chimères et Merveilles, on the portraits she paints sculptures and ancestral masks from Africa, Oceania, Asia, the Americas, and even European folklore. They combine, in disturbing settings, radically different artistic expressions, and, although contemporary, they are standardized by traditions. She quite clearly has fun with the differences, even the oppositions, between the forms and the colors, and she accentuates them as she pleases by populating her compositions with foreign animals, tropical plants, corals, excerpts from anatomical diagrams…
A granddaughter of surrealism and the avant-garde, which had first used art labeled as primitive to revolutionize a civilization in decline, Coco Fronsac takes us deep into an oneiric, comical, sometimes burlesque world where cultures mix together to create wonder. Additionally, the series is a vibrant tribute to the most symbolic artists of these movements, whose works she reproduces in every scene and who themselves become characters, such as André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio De Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp among others. Once can even find surrealist resonances in the titles: Voir au-dessus des dessous (Above the Belows), Le Rêveur définitif (The Definitive Dreamer), or even L’œil et les asperges de la lune (The Eye and the Asparagus of the Moon). They are systematically followed by the reference to the “quoted” work, as to better preserve it.
By revisiting and synthesizing photography, sculpture, and painting beyond cultural differences, Coco Fronsac sheds a playful, contemporary light on the works of these artists who populate her imagination.
Valentine Plisnier
Valentine Plisnier is a teacher and researcher in art history and is the author of Le Primitivisme dans la photographie (Editions Trocadéro). She lives and works in Paris.
Coco Fronsac, « Je ne suis pas un cliché ! »
From October 5, 2017 through January 6, 2018
Galerie VOZ’
41 Rue de l’Est
92100 Boulogne-Billancourt
France
