“Zone de confort”: a suspended moment with Anne De Gelas at Été 78

There are not enough words, certainly not enough right words, to define precisely the deeply human, soul-stirring, hybrid work of Anne De Gelas. An attempt, then, to approach it as closely as possible, barely touching it, as it rages and weeps, misses and wants, wounds and heals, appears and disappears.

An anecdote. Some time ago, Anne De Gelas was hanging an exhibition. She was all alone, except for a man cleaning the windows. “For a long time, he didn’t say anything. But when he had finished, he asked very timidly if he could say something. Then he started talking about his homeland, about how he had to leave, had to leave his father behind. ‘I’ve never mentioned this to anyone,’ he said, ‘but now that I see your work, I feel how much I miss my country.’”

Anne De Gelas talks about it with a full heart and a sense of wonder and gratitude. I cannot help but retreat into silence for a few seconds. There is something in Anne De Gelas’s work that reaches deep under the skin. Something in this hybrid tangle of photos, drawings and words that have solidified into poetry that opens up the humanity in others. So much so that a man who misses his father, his fatherland, can find his frayed soul in it. So much so that the Congolese Bukavu of her mother’s childhood permeates the images she made on the Portuguese island of Madeira. So much so that the woman who cared for her during her breast cancer, through the rawness of her book INTERMèDE (un visage de lignes), felt compelled to question everything she had been doing. “While I just wanted to share life experiences.... Sometimes things happen in my images that I do not understand, that I cannot explain, that I do not want to explain.”

INTERMèDE (un visage de lignes), the book and exhibition of the same name at La Châtaigneraie in Liège, crystallized into its glorious form just before the first lockdown, the moment in which “Zone de confort”, her current exhibition at Été 78, was taking shape. In the silence. “I just didn’t manage to draw anymore. I have to draw with a certain regularity, otherwise I lose my hand. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had just finished a cycle at La Châtaigneraie or because that end, which always is difficult, coincided with the stretched out time which we all ended up in and the space that closed around us.”

A SOUVENIR
The need to draw – “drawing detaches me from reality, throws me into another time” – lured Anne De Gelas to her south-facing terrace. “I placed some small objects I had around, animal sculptures, on my terrace table. That was a revelation: in the sunlight, the sharp shadows of those objects immediately came to the fore. I soon felt that they were important, that they expressed the feeling of fear that I was experiencing more and more. Because of the situation we were in, the vulnerability of others that was suddenly laid bare, the involvement that I felt as a woman, as a single mother, with their stories, but also because of what life throws at us every day: desire, loneliness, isolation... Sometimes the feeling that someone was going to break into the house came over me. Without any reason, it was an atmosphere that hovered above the days, a suspended moment, as if something was about to happen. All of that ended up inhabiting my drawings.”

The scenes that etched themselves ephemerally into the terrace table and which would eventually transform into drawings that were, at the same time, both childlike and oppressive, were built with small dolls, which opened up an extra dimension. “They catapulted me back to my childhood. My grandfather sold dolls like that, dressed as lace makers, in the souvenir shops he had in the railway stations of Brussels North and Brussels South and even in Antwerp. I spent many days there, because I needed to be looked after during holidays when my parents had to work, and I didn’t like going to camp. It was magical, I loved the atmosphere of the train stations. They were small shops, really, more like counters, where my grandfather sold all kinds of souvenirs, toys, jewellery... I have very fond memories of the moments when my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I assembled these dolls, dressed them and put them in boxes to sell. Five women, sitting together at a table, working with their hands and talking all the while. How, around that table, that manual act became an automatism, opening up the space for something else. All that became interwoven in those scenes.”

“Zone de confort” is such a wonderful souvenir shop, an ominous ball of memories, atmospheres, impressions, feelings and thoughts. “With constructed memories admittedly, but they attach me to others. They generate stories. Like the photo albums that made my grandmother drift off into tales. Or like dreams. I am a dreamer, I like to sleep. In my dreams I find my dead: my grandmother, my grandfather, my lover... The night has always been an important second life for me. During the lockdown I sometimes even had the feeling that I was more alive in my sleep, because at least there I was moving.”

A QUIVER, A TREMBLING
“Zone de confort” is one such a moving, mobile space in time. As you enter, you are greeted by Anne De Gelas’s voice reading out excerpts from her diary (which are also printed on a large sheet), mixed with sounds that she has picked up from her house, sounds that come closer and closer. This intangible layer slides over the drawings taken from her notebooks – “less definitive, more enigmatic” – and photographs presented in small format – “taken during the lockdown, but also older images that have grown into symbols.” Images that in the new context undergo slight shifts, meaningfully slip, approach and evaporate.

Anne De Gelas’s work is like a continuous appearance, a possibility, a suspended moment. Charged as it is by an essence, a shimmering doubt, friction and ambiguity. “Like a quiver, a trembling, it is alive. Uncertainty, doubt is something living.” Like the hybrid in which she moves vulnerably and playfully. “I once made a work, Collision (2001), with Thierry, my beloved, in which we let things collide just to see what would happen. Each time it would be something entirely different. We were just happy to be there. I like things that can go on without an ending.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop things from ending. In 2013, Anne De Gelas published L’Amoureuse, a turning point in her work, her soul, her heart. “I have been working in these notebooks since 1996-1997, chequered books in which I write, mix and instigate collisions on a daily basis. From L’Amoureuse onwards, that process has been narrowed down and deepened. I wanted to go to something more essential.”

In the book, she reveals herself to be battered, like a body ravaged by tearing feelings, that has desire and love to give, but comes up against an emptiness – her lover collapsed in front of her and their son from a stroke by the shores of the North Sea. “Only afterwards did I realise that I was no longer able to photograph anything but myself. It became clear to me that I missed him, his gaze on my body. I think that this overwhelming presence of the self-portrait – which was not new, I already made self-portraits for my graduation work – springs from that need to be looked at.”

ALMOST NOTHING
My gaze can rest a long time on that skin, the skin on which Anne De Gelas allows time to settle, to continue, to transform, to decay. “I see myself in those photographs, but I also see distance, a different look in my eyes. I become a certain me, a kind of abstraction, a performance, an essence, which at that moment could be me or the other. The time between making the image and showing it allows for detachment. That way, the self-portraits and the other photographs (often sparse images of immeasurably animated spaces and objects, red.) end up on the same level. There are images that I have a hard time with, that require many years before I can look at them, but they are not necessarily self-portraits.”

That is because everything in the image wallows around that paradoxical core of bodily and enigmatic. Tactile and ephemeral, like the photography, the drawing, the word, the book. The second skin. “The grain and the black and white are important to me, but so is the pellicule, the materiality, the limitation of the number of photographs, the concentration that results from that limitation, and then the tactility of the book.”

“That body feels, rather than sees. It is the most sincere thing I know, it is able to say that which cannot be said. Even though the moments I photograph – of myself, my son and I (as in the moving Mère et fils, red.) – often exist only in that image. There is preparation, there is staging, there is fiction that mixes with memories, with dreams, with coincidence, but what I feel at that moment is still very true. Something does actually happen.” Something through which the cracks in the fabric of everyday life become visible. “People often ask me if I have redone my life through my work,” Anne De Gelas says. “I’ve always found that a terrible thought. Redoing your life, what does that mean? No, I have continued my life. I made L’Amoureuse because it was a way to survive. I have the impression that art has always been a way for me to survive. It’s where I put things in order to keep going.”

And thus pain lies next to comfort, anger next to desire, transience next to light. “It’s one next to the other, one over the other. That is in my texts, in which I scrape off layer by layer and erase the anecdotal. It is in my drawings, in the collages I make, where wound and recovery, mistakes and new beginnings lie one on top of the other. Like layers, in which things go on, but in which a return to the past remains possible.” Like a memory in which the overwhelming and the almost nothing nestle. The overwhelming of the almost nothing. I look at almost nothing, and it gets under my skin, uproots my soul, overwhelms me defencelessly. “What touches me the most is just that: those small things, gestures, objects of every day, that we barely notice, that appear, disappear and actually fill the whole of life. That is the thin thread on which we walk.”

That which life simply hands us is enough to fill that life. The void becomes miraculous, the truth luminous, the memory possible. It is that possibility, grounded in wonder, grown in generosity, warmth, vulnerability and doubt, that fills the work of Anne De Gelas to the brim. The emptiness as space for the full life. “In art, you lay down your shield,” she says. Art is defenceless resistance. To resist is to exist. In full, open and bare, vulnerable and grandiose. There, in that light between the shadows, things happen that I do not understand, that I cannot explain, that I do not want to explain.

ZONE DE CONFORT
> 28/2, Été 78, www.ete78.com, www.annedegelas.com