Anne Marie Rognon

“It’s funny. Something’s not quite right about her frames. The colours tinkle with the sound of her play-ground. At each square of her coloured banana peel hopscotch, she tosses us elsewhere, laughing at us from a merry-go-round with a screw loose. Marabout, boots and saddles, saddle and horse, a horse named Dash, dashes of colour, bits of everything and bits of nothing, game of the goose and game of delight – her series of paintings keep coming one after the other, like a sitcom. The artist takes us here and there, playfully, on a false lead to no one in particular. Honey in cupped hands, sucked sweets: she tangles us up in the skin of the scenery. She has us touch the ring in the water, the floating palm tree or the cyclone spinning nonsensically around its lopsided eye, and has us twist around discreetly with it. Her colourised postcards give off sporadic neon flashes but there is nothing to be found at the address listed. Where then does she see this living condensation, this disoriented rebus, this made-up surreal, from? The swing or the ladder hanging in thin air or the rope with no end propel us under showers of pink and amidst colours, which, at second glance, do not exist. The artist, who remains anonymous, diverts us every time from the direction of the tour and settles us down in the gleeful melancholy of a here and now that we believe to be unfamiliar. It should be said that she has composed all of this based on a rather strange geometry. Perhaps she crafted some sort of Möbius paintbrushes, which twist space and time, bringing us back to the same place just as we thought we were stepping through her stunning sceneries. Like the dreams we used to have as children, in which we ran without moving forward. Except in this case it is not the usual terrifying version. It is the funny version. Because nobody moves forward here. Irony nibbles at our toes like the tickles of tiny milk-toothed monsters that we will never see. We wonder if any of it is even real. And then, with the flick of a hose, a video or a rope, she yanks the picture out of its frame and us with it. In a way, it all seems like a circus in which invisible acrobat clowns lie in wait for us.”

Fausse piste, Camille Fallen, 2020
Translated by Lucy Pons, 2022