Suspended moments, characters in expectation, traditional techniques reinvented, are at first the common angle of the work of Maguy Banq and Alexia Tailleur. The Sisyphus of Maguy, is condemned as in the Greek legend to push laboriously its immense stone, the tensed muscles, the skinned flesh, on the contrary ofthe classic sculptures with their impeccable drapes, and their smooth faces. The Icons of Alexia do not celebrate holy Christians, but martyrs of the modern, marginal and homeless times. The religion disappears to become social philosophy. The gold leaf is not surrounded by defined outlines but becomes new stratum of the image, a precious touch erasing the trivial.
However, the searches of both women are not the same, even if they distil here the irony and the absurd. Maguy Banq seems closer to Samuel Beckett with her aimless characters, absorbed in the fulfillment of burlesque acts of which they do not perceive any more the goal, such as the protagonists of “Waiting for Godot”. The young Toulousian artist turns more in social and urban problems, sometimes focused on the human being - the grandmother in levitation against a stony wall-, sometimes on cities without inhabitants, whose houses are squeezed against the other such as Brazilian favelas or biblical vision of an abandoned Bethlehem. All these houses inhale, all these human beings blow in their ascent of an empty summit, struggling certainly for a social recognition or abandonment. Sufflare, sufferre* would have said the Latin Elders …
Axel Sourisseau
Sufflare, Sufferre
Janary 23rd - March 15th 2014
Maguy Banq / Alexia Tailleur