They will be able to see the obstacles and to circumvent them

«Let’s reserve to the artist the severe and controllable task of starting the paintings, so we can attribute to the spectator the advantageous, convenient and nicely comical role of completing them by meditation or dream».

Félix Fénéon, anarchist, Art Literature and Theater critic of art, defender of Charles Henry’s color theory and author of Harmonies of forms and colors in 1891, could be the godfather of Virginie Yassef’s new exhibition, Ils seront capables de voir les obstacles et de les contourner (They will be able to see the obstacles and to circumvent them).

From her modus operandi, Virginie says: «There is first this vision which is very 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 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 Contemporany Art Center of La ferme du Buisson and then at Théâtre 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 fifth 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 scenarii: «They are able to see the obstacles and get around them», «Without eyelids, the fish are kept awake by the light», «The rods are the photoreceptors that allow twilight and 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 palettes with the organization of the color circle dear to the Pointillists. «Let’s reserve to the artist the severe and controllable task of starting the paintings, so we can attribute to the spectator the advantageous, convenient and nicely comical role of completing them by meditation or dream». Félix Fénéon, anarchist, Art Literature and Theater critic of art, defender of Charles Henry’s color theory and author of Harmonies of forms and colors in 1891, could be the godfather of Virginie Yassef’s new exhibition, Ils seront capables de voir les obstacles et de les contourner (They will be able to see the obstacles and to circumvent them). She has collected images, such as a waving palm slowly colored by gelatines as used by theatrical lighting; placed in front of the lens, they flutter at the mercy of the trade winds and give 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 exhibition, 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 theater 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!