Une nuit lentement transfigurée (extract)
By Marcel Moreau
Exhibition Annick Blavier - Robin Vokaer, 1998
“[...] That is her magic, behind these moucharabiehs*, where whatever we pick out attracts us, almost dancingly, vacillating for sure, towards a vein, a kernel, a source that could be the origin of the discrete beauty of things, where we never know well enough what to say or what to do to make them speak more truly, more purely, than the screaming and raucous truth of the world.
“What Annick Blavier no longer expects to find in chromatic clamouring, she seeks in the long, long, intimate rumblings of what is unformulated. Or in the just-as-secret confabulations of the energies between them. Through her touch and her vision, the obscure becomes, in its own way, polyphonic. Out of this muted polyphony of cries, prayers and stuttering, from the bowels of the Earth to those of Mankind, for those who want to hear it, interrupts the mortal silence of Death. [...]”
* A grill made of rods found in traditional Arab architecture that enable one to see without being seen.
Le temps s'expose (extract)
By Patrick Amine
Exhibition Annick Blavier - Robin Vokaer, 1998
“[...] From the outset, then, the substance or the topography that she builds up is not in an analogical relationship, but an undulating, shaken restoration of a hollow that has become a mark. In any other series, it's a mise en abîme that appears in the superimposition of the sewn canvases. This layered effect circumscribes the place, the territory of the artist, where time and body merge. Even so, the plan and the imprint are not ends in themselves. They are the elements of a minimal grammar that Annick Blavier uses, exploring its combinatory possibilities, through superimposition, insertion, crossings. This might produce a grid pattern, or cantilevered parallels, depending on the marouflage effects, collages, and confrontations, which are also the means that time (that of creation) uses to reveal itself.
“Passing from the initial horizontality (a blank canvas laid on the ground, waiting for traces) to the verticality of the finished work, offered for contemplation by the viewer (and with a disregard for the posture in which the combination was made), Annick Blavier manages to bring out the foundations of the work, its implications in terms of ‘deconstructing the painting’, in the sense intended by the Support-Surface group. And in their own way, the large monochrome paper works mark the change in gravity and the opposition of rhythms. The play of opposites is similarly used in this medium, here rumpled and rubbed, reflecting austerity, fragility. In this aesthetic of rarefaction, obeying a deliberately minimal grammar, it is important to be able to interpret a thickness as belonging to the body, from its place and temporality. It is, all in all, the definition of a rhythm. [...]”
Image en gestation (extract)
By Claude Lorent
Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Pierre Hallet, 1994
“[...] For Annick Blavier painting is like an extreme state. Like a demanding state of emergency. And this really is about painting: the choice of canvas, rough and snagging, smooth or absorbent paper, completely or almost blank, to eliminate any interference from intermediaries; oil paints, of course, but in direct contact with the hand; the body speaks and declares the commitment.
“Neither telling a story nor testifying, neither illustrating nor showing, but adhering to this falsely cutaneous image that cannot mask its need for support or its fear of being taken only for its material nature, even if, in gestures, it is very active and deliberate. It is just that the body argues with the mind in a salutary and undivided fury, a frenetic search, threading, with a soothing osmosis. [...]”