The Ferrero Gallery offers us a dual exhibition where two artists express their art with warmth and passion. From head to toe, wax doll, rag doll, porcelain doll, and marble doll. Virginie de Saint Mears expresses her spirituality through works of reclamation, old dislocated dolls, the crucified teddy bear, the crown of thorns.
The artist shows us the threshold between childhood and adulthood, the innocence sacrificed with this crucified comfort toy. It should not be seen as an attack on the most sacred of Christian symbols. The work should be taken with a grain of salt: murdered childhood, lost innocence? As we continue our visit, we get a few answers: the Titanic staircase, the dismembered dolls.
This doll is the symbol of Virginie’s work. Has the little girl lost her doll, did it sink with the ship, was it destroyed by the course of life? What to think of this crucified teddy bear? In fact, it is up to each person to answer. Virginie provides us with the keys to respond to our vanished childhood. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
One must be a child, in the noblest sense, to understand Virginie. The second artist, Monique Thibaudin, immerses us in the Agora, the Pantheon, with Gods as the foundation of her work, Egypt and its deities. Drawings, the lyrebird, the bird God, a nod to Cocteau in the stroke, Monique resides in Vallauris. The bird-woman, heaven or hell? It’s up to each person to dare to open the door and the answer will never be the same.
From land to sea, she takes us into her universe, her world, and shares it with us. Let yourself go, immerse in the works of these two artists. While Virginie seems to seek an answer to the death of innocence, Monique introduces us to her pantheon, bringing us back to the origins of spirituality. God, Gods?
We will not decide, leaving each to form their own opinion. Humanity has become an animal again, not to displease Rousseau, exceeding the noble savage and seeming closer to the caverns today. Virginie and Monique, in a certain way, denounce fanaticisms by reconciling God and the Gods, but will humans be capable of understanding?
That is their challenge and the true interest of this exhibition, organized by Guillaume Aral, director of the Ferrero Gallery in Nice.
Thierry Jan
