The Louis Gendre Gallery in Chamalières is currently presenting works by Clermont-based artist Anne-Marie Rognon. The “Des Astres Solaires” exhibition can be visited until January 11, 2025.
The artist Anne-Marie Rognon lives in Clermont and is witnessing, like everyone else, the transformation of the city, which is taking place with construction equipment, particularly backhoe loaders. The backhoe loader is precisely a recurring subject in the selection of works that she is currently presenting at the Galerie Louis Gendre in Chamalières. The exhibition entitled Solar Starswould it be an ode to the InspiRe project that she sees taking shape day by day under her windows? “No, that has nothing to do with it,” she said without any hesitation. “I was already designing buckets and backhoe loaders in 2008! I like painting this machine. I made a video where I said that when I was little, I wanted to drive a bulldozer. It goes back a long time, it’s like an attraction. When I was at the Beaux-Arts school I also made a video in which I played with a small backhoe loader.” Let’s not believe that Anne-Marie Rognon’s artistic studies cut her off from her early vocation as a civil engineer. “When I was a child, I climbed trees, I already painted and made beaded necklaces,” she explains.
The backhoe loader, a valuable tool
“I got attached to the fig of the backhoe loader and I painted it in several copies, zoomed in, zoomed out, with piles of dead leaves, piles of earth. The backhoe object is magnified with ceramic buckets, to make the tool precious…” explains the artist who, however, did not take advantage of the construction site in front of her home to present her work to the workers. “There they are no longer there, they are gone… but I could find them again. I don’t know what they would think of this work, perhaps it would amuse them.” If certain buckets made by Anne-Marie Rognon are full of glitter, it is to better evoke the precious side of the earth, a material on which humans live, a material in which flowers grow, another favorite subject of the creator.
The disaster, the earth that is stirred up literally and figuratively
“Behind all this there is a philosophical side of course, but there is also intuitive painting with the pleasure of color, the joy of material, of thickness. When I create a flower, I like the play of color, the one that comes out of the tube but also the one that is printed on clothes.” Painting is therefore not as down to earth as a first-hand reading might lead one to imagine. Solar Stars in three words, it is disaster, the earth which is shaken literally and figuratively and the garden with the flower which grows between heaven and earth despite the destiny of the world. “The flowers are there to soothe, the pots are there to show that there is life, human life.” One day Anne-Marie Rognon lost a tooth. This immediately made him think of the teeth of shovels that nibble the earth, and gave him the idea of making a ceramic sculpture, glazed in blue. Thus was born ceramic sculpture Blue tooth and then she made a bucket, a sort of jaw with teeth, entitled Long teeth!
Des Astres Solaires exhibition of paintings, ceramic sculptures and videos by Anne-Marie Rognon until January 11, 2025,
Galerie Louis Gendre, 7 rue Charles Fournier in Chamalières, Wednesday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
On December 4 at 6 p.m., on the occasion of this exhibition, clarinet concert by Guillaume Labussière. On the program Rouzbeh Rafie (1981) Air-Sound, for solo clarinet in Bb, Myrtó Nizami (1994) Terpen II, for solo clarinet in Bb, Sina Fallahzadeh (1981) Five ephemeral reflections, for solo clarinet in Bb. This musical moment is only accessible by reservation.
