Isabelle Lévénez, Fragmented Portraits: Videos/Drawings

4 December – 28 March 2010

Angers Museum of Fine Arts, Prints and Drawings Department and Rodin's exhibition

For the first time the Angers Museum of Fine Arts is confronting a contemporary artist and a luminary of the previous century. Eyeball to eyeball with the monumental figure of Rodin in the exhibition "The Portrait Workshop: Rodin Faces His Models", Isabelle Levenez responds with videos, drawings and a writing wall.  
Born in Nantes in 1970, Levenez now lives in Trélazé and teaches at the Angers School of Art. Since 1991 her work in different media – drawings, video and photography – has been approaching its core concern, the human body, as a space to be discovered and explored. Transformed, made up, masked, retouched and blurred, the body, whether her own or another's, is submitted for our consideration.   

Isabelle Lévénez delights in antithesis and ambiguity. Almost always shot through with elusive undertones – a story, a memory, a secret, something from the innermost personal depths – her images, titles and written sentences disturb with intimations of fragmented realities. This is ongoing interplay between innocence, dream and fantasy, between gentleness and violence.   
The four-screen video installation Il recherche Elle (He Seeks She, 2003) shows fragments of a female body being caressed by a male gaze and hand in images bathed in the unreality of a green, nocturnal luminescence.  
Similarly in Désir (Desire, 2004), an eight-screen loop set unapologetically in the midst of the Rodin exhibition, fragments of a woman's body – face, feet, hands – are seen floating in a strange ichor, in a shifting, disquieting aura that mingles suggestions of paint and marble. Is this drowning or ecstasy?
Projected inside an enclosed space, the video Frontière (Border, 2009) is a static, emotionless presentation of characters enveloped in silence in a steam bath.

Lévénez reveals another string to her bow with a group of watercolour ink drawings created specially for the exhibition and interacting with Rodin's portraits. Sometimes accompanied by large-format sheets of paper written on with chalk, they are shown in two separate spaces: a series of eleven large vertical works at the entry to the Rodin exhibition introduce elusive faces, neither masculine nor feminine: red and brown profiles seen alone or by twos and sometimes opposite each other, with colour runs and bleeds suggesting some latent harshness. More red and brown "fragmented portraits" are to be found in the series of thirty small drawings in the prints and drawings room: void faces, scraps of bodies, internal organs that are impalpable, condensed, enigmatic. With them is a writing wall, an expressive form that has the artist inscribing the same sentence over and over on a wall with her left hand.

These allusions take us back to childhood as Lévénez, with a masterly mix of images and mise en scène, perpetuates the memory of a personal/collective imaginary domain; the outcome is a confrontation with our anxieties and relationship with the world.

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am–6 pm
Admission: 4 €/3 €

Exhibition curators: Christine Besson, Patrick Le Nouëne

Catalogue: Isabelle Lévénez, portraits fragmentés vidéos/dessins, with texts by Christine Besson, Patrick Le Nouëne, Philippe Piguet, Anaïde Demir, 72 pages, 19 euros