Ah ! Que la guerre est jolie (Oh what a lovely war)
march . april 2011
Espace 2.13 PM . La Celle-Saint-Cloud
But what do you imagine! That there are goodies and baddies? That flowers are for little girls and guns for little boys? That the big bad wolf didn’t gobble up grandmother? Or that Cinderella is living happily ever after with Prince Charming?
Time to wake up! Life is much more complicated, and more serious, and much odder! We are immersed in the duality of opposites: it’s what Anne Cindric has been painting all this time, so open your eyes!
What a cute little Toile de Jouy*, with its pastoral setting, its hunting scene and children holding hands. But what are those soldiers doing in action right in the middle there, that hovering helicopter, and those marks red as blood? The Toile de Jouy* is not really all that cute, in this painting where everything is out of kilter, form and content, proportions, perspectives, the notion of time. Disorder reigns, chaos, even Apocalypse! What celebration!
Yes, to me Anne Cindric’s painting is completely celebratory. We laugh to see phylacteries floating around armed men, war painted in rose pink, characters become giants thrown into a landscape of baroque lilliputians. We are lost in a maze of references: small pictures punctuate the main picture like the predellas of the primitives, themes are drawn from fairytales, sometimes the style seems inspired by the bright naturalism of Epinal prints, and the monochrome grisailles recall the stained-glass windows of our Gothic churches. Each work reveals a fragment of our world, the imprint of cruelty and sweetness, fatalism and struggle, lightheartedness and pain, childhood memories and adult ordeals. Moreover, we are profoundly destabilised by Anne Cindric’s female perspective on worlds perceived as almost exclusively male. She demystifies the demonstrations of power without deriding them, questions the attributes of authority, emphasises both the redeeming and destructive dimension of every act of force. She injects serenity and mischievousness into situations that could be unbearable.
Immerse yourself in it, identify the codes, let your own preferences guide you towards the strapping lad with his muscular torso or the flute player’s melody. They will take you into a world of fancy more true than nature!
*Toile de Jouy : a type of printed calico created in the 18th century by French Manufacturers, with monochrome patterns on a white background and representing bucolic scenes.
Frédérique Paumier-Moch
14 december 2010