Niki de Saint Phalle. Sometimes it's hard to remember her name, which seems like a playful pseudonym. But her work, almost always alone or sometimes accompanied by her inseparable Jean Tinguely, is unmistakable.
Sculptures of inflated women ready to fly like colored human clouds or fixed to the ground like in the Moderna Museet park in Stockholm, or floating like in the Zurich train station or spinning like the famous fountains in Igor Stravinsky Square, next to the Pompidou in Paris.
The Vallois gallery in Paris presents one of the late series of the French-American artist who will always be remembered for her series Les Tirs, a performance (so fashionable in the Paris of the sixties with Tinguely, Yves Klein and the Nouveaux Realistes) in the one in which the artist leaves the fabrics or metal plates like a drain after being painted. She sometimes does it with other artists, such as Jasper Johns, in a tribute to Robert Rauschenberg.
The shooting thing is just a symbol of an artist who expanded the idea of feminine power with dolls and figures (the famous lullabies) that were not exactly barbies and were a hymn to universal femininity.
In Les tableaux éclates, which were created in 1993, Saint Phalle's art is closely linked to his indestructible love for Tinguely, who had died a few months before, in 1991. They are a dedication, a message that he wants to send to the afterlife with a heartbreaking and beautiful letter. There is his art and also his, specializing in mechanical sculptures that move.
“Hymn of love. Cannibalism. Communion. /Jean, I'm eating you. I take your strength. / Your soul unites with mine” (Himno de amor. Comunión. Jean, te devoro. Me quedo con tu fuerza / tu alma se une a la mía”
At the same time, De Saint Phalle does not remain in the personal circumstance but rather "shares his intimacy with the public and resists (pain) with creation, with the works to which he grants an intimate truth that is full of humanism and universality." ”says Annabelle Ténèze, an expert on Saint Phalle's work.
Sculptor more than painter, printer and filmmaker of experimental films, the artist creates paintings in which the characters come out of the canvas, and splash around outside of it, breathing the air of the gallery.
Some, like Ganesh, are deconstructions of dismembered lullabies, like the girl who dismembers her doll. Others like Horloge (clock), the hands have taken to flying and no longer mark the time but act as a weather vane, waiting for the wind.
Bloom is a party in which the artist invites Matisse and his figures from the Jazz series, Keith Haring's tireless dancing figures with a metallic blue background reminiscent of Klein. In Tête a tête, the play of eyes of the two masks is a series of glances that multiply, faces that compose, recompose, decompose. De Saint Phalle turns the pain of Tinguely's loss into colorful bustle and formal humor.
The labels go poorly with the sculptor from Neuilly-sur-Seine, who died in California a little over 20 years ago. Either you have to put many or it is better to leave the space blank. Traversing paths, trends, attitudes, friendships and creative groups, her trajectory is marked by the company of her colleagues (especially Tinguely and the Nouveaux Réalistes) and by her loneliness.
De Saint Phalle is a kind of Agnés Varda, who was the only female director of the Nouvelle Vague of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais... The cinema of her life partner, Jacques Demy, followed other paths, more lyrical and musical, less verité.
From Saint Phalle you know your way, you don't need GPS. It is guided by some techniques copied from Tinguely and the rest is looking forward. “In The Tableaux éclatés, the bright colors are even more exaggerated, brought to life thanks to the power of electric light. If it is called 'éclatés', which explode, it is because they come out of the fabric but in a sweet and relatively slow way, measured in any case," warns Annabelle Ténèze.
Art sometimes serves to get angry and alert; sometimes to think, to get excited and even to think, get excited and make people laugh, as Niki de Saint Phalle achieves in this exhibition that runs until October 28 at its headquarters at 36-38 rue de Seine in Paris.
