Félix Fénéon, anarchist, Art Literature and Theatre critic of art, defender of Charles Henry’s color theory and author of Harmonies of forms and colors in 1981, could be the godfather of Virginie Yassef’s new exhibition, Ils seront capables de voir les obstacles et les contourner (They will be able to see the obstacles and to circumvent them). From her modus operandie, Virginie says: « There is first this vision which is solitary. I see what I want to do, and at that moment I am in a spectator position. »

But even more, she wants the public to learn how to be attentive to the world around them and  become a spectator and not just a viewer. And for that, as Fénéon recommends, she puts a at the core of her work onirism and suspension, forcing the seeker to go beyond the physical phenomenon.In this perspective, and for more than two years, Virginie Yassef had focused on Hearing and thanks to the New Settings program of Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès had imagined an adaptation in several times of Bradbury’s play The Veldt, at la Criée in Rennes, at the Contemporary Art Center of La ferme du Buisson and then at Théatre des Amandiers in Nanterre.

But a new body of work about another sensory universe was already in gestation and for her new exhibition at the gallery (the first since 2001), it is to the sense of the Vision that she devotes herself. A vision that she explores, unravels and dissects to transcend it. And for that, she has slowly and patiently collected, collected, collected.

She has collected sentences that for years she has found in the pages of the newspaper Le Monde and which represent potential scenar: « They are able to see the obstacles ad get around them », « Withput eyelids, the fish are kept awake by the light », « The rods are the photoreceptors that allow twillightand night vision, while the daytime and colorful vision involves the participation of other photoreceptors, the cones. »

She has collected colors, and her worktable is covered with swatches, felts with a thousand shades, small watercolor palette with the organization of the color circle dear to the Pointilliss.

She has collected images, such as a waving palm slowly colored by theatrical lightin; placed in front of the lens, they flutter at the mercy of the trade winds and gives birth to a languidly psychedelic film. Or such as different eyes anatomies she drew for a children’s book published by the MacVal and that for the ehibition, she has declined in large lithographs with majestic colors on the old presses of the printer Mourlot in the workshops of Idem.

Lastly, she has collected unstable equilibria, strange movements,falls and psychedelic turning planks, chameleon eyes, turtle legs…

A series of new sculptures-objects that more than simple props for a theatre or a funfair, become the characters who inhabit the recesses of 33 rue de Seine and make the spectators able to see the obstacles and to circumvent them,or to contemplate them!

A country road. A tree.
Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting.
He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before.
Enter Vladimir.
These lines introducing the first scene of Waiting for Godot (1952) by Samuel Beckett could almost be à propos to accompany this proposition by Virginie Yassef. They ignite our imagination and immediately immerse us in a certain theatre of the absurd. Indeed, the promenade at the Vallois gallery starts with a tree trunk, the very one that obstructed the rue des Cascades in Ménilmontant during this year’s Nuit Blanche event in Paris. Confusion
was at its height around L’Objet du doute (2013). « Is it marble? » was one question being asked. Not far from here, in the Tuileries Gardens, The Tree of Vowels by Giuseppe Penone surely triggers similar poetic comments.
Then suddenly, Yassef’s tree, like a real fictional character, stirs. As if drawing its last breath…
Beyond this treacherous appearance is a clearing presenting various works which expand upon the recent exhibitions at La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec (A Wall of Sand Has Just Collapsed, December 2012 to February 2013) and at La Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel (The Monkey Sign with Julien Bismuth, April to October 2013).
They are accompanied by a selection of Ghost Scenarios, a series of enigmatic photographs which Yassef has been developing since 2003 and function as would a narrative predella panels in Italian painting. The 2012 installation in Noisy-le-Sec, No one has ever seen a dog deliberately exchange a bone with another dog, was partly inspired by Investigations of a Dog (1922) by Franz Kafka; this piece was the beginning of a long-term commitment towards the kind of staging and scenography encountered in theatre. It was the backdrop for a mutant show during which, between Noisy and Noisiel, a child transformed into a dog. Here, one of the elements
becomes a peacock feather wheel: this motorised deployment exaggerates this animal’s extraordinarily seductive
exhibitionism. In this same environment, which isn’t so dissimilar to those created by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, the viewer is invited to listen to a conversation, worthy of Beckett’s play or the exchanges between the dogs in Kafka’s text. Several fake stones and logs gathered here question human behaviour. Yassef proposes to “attend sculptures” which are “all set to talk”.

In October 2013, nature in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with its famous concrete trompe-l’oeil reproductions
led the artist to put together a twopart live experience on and around an empty plinth. In so doing, she managed to avoid its classical constraints. From resin to polystyrene and painted cardboard, the trick materials are
far from traditional bronze and closer to Disney, theatre, or science fiction films. Orality, sound, movement and the tactile attraction to elucidate these mysterious illusions are all at play to amplify the potential for wonderment.
“To be continued” was Emilie Renard’s title for her interview with Virginie Yassef. Indeed!
Caroline Hancock

Curator : ALBERTINE DE GALBERT

PILAR ALBARRACÍN (Spain) . GILLES BARBIER (France) . FREDI CASCO (Paraguay) MARINA DE CARO (Argentina) . MATÍAS DUVILLE (Argentina) . ANA GALLARDO (Argentina) JUAN FERNANDO HERRÁN (Colombia) . MARTIN KERSELS (USA). HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA (Brazil) PAULINA SILVA HAUYÓN (Chili) & WALTER ANDRADE (Argentina) . VIRGINIE YASSEF (France) Paulina Silva Hauyón & Walter Andrade Henrique Oliveira Matías Duville

“Try a little tenderness!” as the song goes, like an invitation to sink into the well-padded recesses of a grandmother’s old armchair. Tenderness is one of the strongest components of human nature. It is neither sentimentality nor mushiness, yet its suggestion alone often triggers excesses of modesty or cynicism, the intensity of which clearly indicates that it is an essential emotion that touches our innermost core. Often denigrated and considered as the prerogative of children, old people and women — in short the weak, tenderness is nevertheless a great source of resilience in the face of violence carried out against body and mind.

In a lecture entitled “The Hollow of the Palm and Infrared Love,” the psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Klein. offered a definition of the term by default: “Tenderness is neither possession, nor submission — which objectify — nor passion, nor addiction —which amputate and merge fractions of subjects.” According to him, the subtlety in tenderness resides in the “right distance,” very slight but not nil, which separates two free subjects connected to one another..

Articulated around the notion of the “right distance,” this exhibition questions our connection to the edge, physical limits and otherness. At times rubbed raw or overwhelmed, as when an image, gesture, or word become unhinged and invasive, this limit shifts, whether one is the victim or the author of this shift.

It is the crossing of that tenuous limit between tenderness and the obscene that is at work in Spanish artist Pilar Albarracín’s video La Cabra, in which the artist dances with a goatskin sack of wine that slowly colors her folk costume blood red.

The embrace and the separation of bodies are also the subjects of the Californian artist Martin Kersels’ photographs entitled Tossing a Friend, which literally illustrates a brutal distancing of the artist’s body and the body of Melinda, his ex-partner. Conversely, with Posición Horizontal, a work by Colombian artist Juan Fernando Herrán, the other is not distanced but rather contained, assimilated. The series of nesting beds, each one fitting into another like Matryoshka dolls, suggests a mise en abîme of childhood or one’s innermost world, as if they were being placed in a sheltered spot.

Tenderness as protection and consolation runs throughout the work of the Argentinean artist Matías Duville. Coming straight out of his large-format drawings of unreal landscapes, a giant fish hook —of rusted metal and the size of a person —is gently resting on a blanket that brings to mind the same kinds of blankets found lying around in old houses, the simple sight of which is comforting.

Finally videos by Ana Gallardo (Estela) and Virginie Yassef (L’Arbre, in collaboration with Julien Prévieux), along with several other video works, illustrate the fragile space tenderness embodies, between movement and immobility, silence and crying out.

Albertine de Galbert

. Director of Inecat (Institut national d’expression, de création, d’art et de thérapie [National Institute of expression, creation, art and therapy]).

. Patrice van Eersel, “Une soudaine irruption de la tendresse ?” in Le Grand Livre de la Tendresse (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), p. 23.