Première ligne

Anne-Valérie Gasc presents Première ligne, a series of Saint Andrew's crosses screen-printed with black powder on fireproof paper. Weakened figures of architectural reinforcement objects, these images put in tension the strength of a front line and the fragility of an inaugural writing. To exacerbate this contradiction, the prints will be successively burned at the time of their sale, if it takes place: the burning of the black powder will definitively mark the paper with the image of the crosses. From then on, it is in the destructive gesture that the power of the works comes to life, reminding us - following the example of William Turner who, in 1832, dynamited the canvases surrounding his own, with a single spot of red paint added in extremis to his Helvoetsluys marine - that any vernissage is not a moment of completion of the work but, on the contrary, the moment of its initiation. Anne-Valérie Gasc's Première ligne will only take on its autonomy at the perilous moment of its firing.