Lorraine Audric: Berlin/Trizac
Parsons Paris Faculty Lorraine Audric curated the Berlin/Trizac exhibition, showing from June 29 – Sept 15, 2019.
With Berlin/Trizac, artist Pierre Jouve tells a personal story of historical relevance and universal resonance, based on a dichotomy between these two places: Trizac, a small village in the quiet French catholic countryside of Auvergne where nothing happens, and the big busy cosmopolitan city of Berlin where destruction and violence are brewing.
We are in between 1937 and 1939, and the artist’s parents live in Berlin in what he imagines must have been an odd mixture of great material comfort (his father was an important journalist) and immense emotional strain (his mother was of Jewish origins). Pierre Jouve never once heard them talk about this time, except to mention it as an initial trigger of the mental illness his mother will later develop; an intriguing mystery that led him to trace back the past, undertaking a vast search in city and state archives as well as in personal and collective memories, creating a series of works that explore and revisit these two enigmatic years.
Filled with phantoms and characters from that time period, that are imagined to continue to live and age, Berlin/Trizac is presented to the visitor as a multi-media exhibition where archival documents stand alongside paintings and drawings; photography and fiction mingle with history, memory and images are manipulated to an extent that they literally and physically flatten and distort the past, leaving room for the visitor’s own narrative to take shape.
Presented by curator Lorraine Audric, in the beautiful Napoleonic stables from Aurillac Fine Arts Museum, until September 15th.
