Fireplaces

Révélations Emerige, Paris
04.12.22 - 12.02.23

It is because we recognise, because it reminds us of something that we are surprised.  Yes, we have already seen that somewhere, we remember that film: it is there,  on the canvas/screen, and despite this feeling of memorial proximity, we feel  something of a surprise because the original scene has been distorted,  and it disconcerts us. 

This is what Annabelle Agbo Godeau’s painting facetiously plays with, this discrepancy  between the same and the different, taking the memory and the culture  of the spectator and rubbing it the wrong way. Thus, Leda and the Swan is,  as is well known, a commonplace in Western painting and sculpture (Rubens,  Vinci, Veronese). From the myth, it is texts and images that come back to us  when standing in front of this Chant du cygne (2020) where the main character  looks at us, carrying in their arms a bird whose disproportionate neck, like  a feather boa, goes around their neck, head and beak resting on their shoulder;  the whole scene is on a monochrome blue background with, like three crests,  the faces of three women with prominent cheekbones wearing ballet dancers’  costumes – and it is, upon consideration, Zizi Jeanmaire and her “feathered  thing” which imposes itself, while the comparison abolishes, as in Proust, the  past and perhaps lost time.

With Annabelle Agbo Godeau, nothing is ever one-way: what is convened is the plurality  of meanings through constant additions of possible references. To mix what one  recognises as parts to make a whole – and a harmonious whole – it is, it seems,  the bias which identifies the very personal aesthetics of the artist.  It is also a matter of involving the spectator to better disturb them, without ever  brutalising them. Most often, the weapon used is humour, as in the other Leda (2021), a blue monochrome where a swan of considerable size seems to envelop  a naked Leda in its embrace, while slightly pink bubbles of various sizes run  through the painting – and where one can see what one wants.

It is these semantic discrepancies that are compelling and make us smile. To continue  the theme of the swan (an obsessive theme as are, in Annabelle Agbo Godeau’s  work, the snake and the woman): where have we seen this close-up of crossed  legs, these feminine feet pointing in thin strappy shoes? Probably in many  1930s films (The Blue Angel?) – besides, this painting, entitled Miss Swan (2021), is, as if in a wink, in black and white; but there is something that  destroys everything in order to rebuild it differently: this little pink box  in which a woman, face puffed up, covered with bandages, “phones”, it is said,  “her husband three weeks after surgery”. It’s Marlene Dietrich versus the  housewife under fifty: you’d have to have a very short memory not to laugh internally. And heartily so.

Paloma Hidalgo