Resuming the famous logo, associating a black mask and a feather, was created in 1927 by Maximilien Vox, and appeared as early as issue number 5. This exhibition, described by BEN as one of the best exhibits at La Menuiserie, combines the work of Marc LAVALLE, watercolorist, painter, sculptor, born in Nice in 1954, with that of Annette MASQUILLIER, a jack of all trades and largely self-taught, interested in all forms of artistic expression.
After Lycée Masséna, Marc Lavalle joined the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, then the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He returned to Nice while organizing numerous exhibitions abroad, in Luxembourg where he also participated in its Sculpture Biennale; he created the Kairouan Watercolor Biennale (Tunisia), the Ymage gallery in Nice, and is featured at the Salon d’Automne in Paris…
Then, while directing his brushes towards the southern Mediterranean countries—Rome, Istanbul, Naples, Tunis, Tangier, Marrakech, the Rif… being subjects of exhibitions—his creations focus on the architecture of baroque facades of Nice and Italy, chapels, perched villages…
Annette MASQUILLIER is a jack of all trades and largely self-taught; interested in all forms of artistic expression, she has nonetheless made puppet creation her specialty.
MARC LAVALLE
artist living and working in Nice
What do these bodies emerge from, pain, birth?
Pain teaches us that we have a body. Without it, the play of muscles, the network of nerves, the cord of tendons, the pulleys, articulation, bone structure—all this machinery that sets in motion for the spectacle of life would remain unknown. Without it and without the curiosity that has stripped bodies of their skin, allowing to see, understand, name, and reveal in the theaters of anatomy the springs of human tragedy.
The choice of technique, the line, goes to the essentials; capturing the movement between freedom and constraint.
The mummies of Palermo have ceased to struggle; they allow themselves to be gazed at or seem to scrutinize us, immobile. They teach us something else.
We harbor a hard core that will reveal itself when the pulp and skin have disappeared.
Yet upon a closer look, the bone has been long announced, it emerges, it shapes the nose, the cheekbones, the forehead, outlines the hands, points at the elbows, the knees, chisels hugs at the shoulders.
The skeleton is a sculpture waiting to be unveiled.
ANETTE MASQUILIER
Artist living and working in TOURNAI (BL)
The heads of Annette Masquilier confront us for various reasons.
Firstly, it is a beautiful ensemble… Here then are the nailed, cracked, half-open, covered, stitched, flammable heads…
Beyond the first impression, that of a certain aesthetic, many readings are possible. Anthropological references are inevitable and point to the mask, scarification, but also to the metamorphoses of the head derived from some mysterious, even cruel, initiation rites.
It is also the complexity of this black box that is the human brain, at once a self-regulated machine and much more, source of reason and unreason.
Taut threads evoke the idea of a network, interference, the circulation of information in a dense universe without apparent order.
It is troubling for those who are troubled or simply question themselves and the world.
It is simply playful for those who consider creation as a sort of game…a revelation of the inner self.
