Cรฉcile Andrieu invites us at the Depardieu gallery to view words with a different approach than their usual definition. She succeeds in making words disappear, atomizing them to keep only the letters, freeing the consonants and vowels, and giving them another meaning, another approach. “Detach from the monopoly of words,” explains the artist.
The artwork made of labels, comprising 15899 pieces, Nominare, these small black cubes ‘Chorus Black’, Au ras des mots, Intro 8/26, or even the vowels, all here is a poem ร la Prรฉvert, a tribute to letters, the desire to forget the notion of language. Cรฉcile Andrieu lives in Japan, and her encounter with the work of Japanese artist Arakawa Shusaku explains her approach, her research, and the completion of her work. The letters become art pieces, the words, as Cรฉcile says, cling to us, and these thousands of labels affixed to a wall are as many invitations to dream, to a dreamlike journey and are understandable by all since they are mere signs, a universal language.
The yellow and black vowels, colors of danger, peril, fluid and flexible letters, warn us: Beware of being trapped by words. In a certain way, the artist transcends etymology, she voluntarily forgets the word to focus on the letter. The question of the origin of the letter poses a query by psychiatrist psychoanalyst Robert Rabot. It is surely this goal Cรฉcile Andrieu is pursuing, and it is up to each of us to respond to it. The essence of the letter, now there’s a beautiful subject to debate.
Words existed before us and letters before words, we shall conclude with Renรฉ Char our investigation on letters and words: “Words know things about us that we ignore about them.” At the origin of letters, of our alphabet? It’s up to each of us to answer; we have until December 31, 2014, to solve this enigma.
Thierry Jan
Galerie Depardieu, 6 rue du docteur Jacques Guigoni
