Miss Recuerdo (21 Av. Max. R.)

Tohé Commaret is a videographer; her brother Grichka is a painter. Both grew up in the 1990s at 21 avenue Maximilien Robespierre in Vitry-sur-Seine. Its concrete terrace, towers, halls, corridors, lifts, and landings form the concrete and incredible meanders that their respective bodies of work endlessly explore and reconfigure. In a documentary and fictive  register, Tohé Commaret films this matrixial space through the eyes or off-the-shoulders of her characters, who are often between two ages or straddling periods of life. In motion or in a loop, they seek breaches, hidden flues through which to tell their stories and imagine their trajectory. Grichka Commaret’s airbrushed paintings compress these landscapes into small formats—rarely taller or wider than about thirty centimetres. They are open windows onto an urban subconsciousness: by the glimmer of cosmic streetlamps, the relentless geometry of buildings amass around the silhouettes that haunt them. Through shared motifs, the films of the sister and the paintings of the brother seem at times to communicate in secret: on the canvas, a mouth approaches the halo of a streetlamp, while onscreen, a girl eats light; an eye painted in acrylic opens, while in the film its pupil is red; numbers follow in succession while the lift rises towards the upper floors 8... 9… 11… 25...

Devised as a conversation between their respective works, the Miss Recuerdo exhibition intervenes on the occasion of the creation of their first co-directed film, Palma, and presents two excerpts from it. Shot on this same concrete slab in Vitry-sur-Seine, the film probes a disappearance: that of Malo, a popular figure in the neighbourhood who left behind her an enigmatic message. Like Tohé’s films and Grichka’s paintings, the fiction takes hold of memorial objects deformed by time, changes of scale, ascendant relationships, and the transformations of age. An allusion to Amarcord, the title of Federico Fellini’s autobiographical daydream, which, in an approximative compression of Italian, means “I remember”, Miss Recuerdo invokes and invents, in Spanglish, bits and bobs of memory, evaporated silhouettes and repressed hopes.

Elsa Vettier
Curator of the exhibition