Stéphanie Sautenet
Stéphanie Sautenet
France
"After a half-hearted stint at the Beaux-arts (Tours, Avignon), I began to imagine a kind of visual and dreamlike narration through collage and the production of "silent books". Then my personal creation essentially focused on drawing with colored pencils or Indian ink. I have also broadened the questioning of being through art by studying art therapy at the Jean-Pierre Klein institute. (INECAT) This teaching allowed me to accompany people in pain in their own plastic and symbolic journey (in psychiatry, psychogeriatrics and addictology) for several decades. I apprehend drawing like a blind man, space, matter, the labyrinthine universe, holding on to my pencil like a stick. A blind man, who, like Tiresias in a prophetic ritual, would try to transcribe the visual field deafened by all his interiority. The tool, the “stylus”, like an extension of the hand or a hybridization of the body, echoes in my opinion the caduceus of Hermes, this psychopomp god. Each drawing is the trace of this journey between the world of the living and the dead, between Eros and Thanatos, the Real and the Symbolic. Art and death are in my opinion inextricably linked. As Jean Genet argued when observing Giacometti's sculptures, "the work is not intended for children's generations"; "every work of art (...) must with infinite patience, from the moment of its elaboration, go down the millennia, join if possible the immemorial night populated by the dead..."! Any image, any drawing is a mask, an open window on death. After the Collection of witches (Galerie A. Dettinger, 2011) inspired by one of my collage books made from an old science school notebook, La vie des saints (Galerie A. Dettinger, 2014), a hallucinated parody of the religious iconography that haunts our art books, the series Elsewhere reports a shift, the encounter with shamanism. Creation is a trance, a spatio-temporal breach and proceeds from the same movement as shamanism. There is a need, like an irrevocable desire to bring to light invisible, concealed presences. It is an opening towards another language where all the kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal,...), all the elements are expressed. The series Bacchanales et jeux pythiques et le prisme du daïmôn (gallery B. Soulié, 2017) are a plunge into shamanism and hallucinated visions on the drum (healing, extraction, soul recovery, psychopomp work, etc.). I let myself be crossed by the hermetic symbolism of the spirits, ours and those of the guides. I then produced small graphic books published by Crocs Électriques: Sans s'effleurir, Conte sans foi ni loi, Gris Moires; which allowed me to reconnect with the silent book, until Impudicus where the word was unraveled through dreams. Then I decided to stop working in shrink & addiction to devote myself to art. Then followed the exhibition Planète Animalice, then the mishmash book OoZ (a Zoo upside down) and an erotic series, Rising and descending Sap, the hermerotic Tarot as a counterpoint to gloom." https://ssoloeil.jimdofree.com/
artworks
drawing
lame vii du tarot hermérotique
série planète animalice
dessin pour jambon-klaxon #1