Bringing matter into the light
For thirty-five years, Franck Delorme put his body in the light of a stage. Today he brings matter into the light on a canvas. Same craft, different support.
Five worlds to explore.
The stage
The ballet goes on, without the music.
5 artworks
Two swans answer each other from one canvas to the next. Odile bows her head to the right, Odette to the left; both were born of Swan Lake, and they only meet when hung together.
Saint-Saëns carries the reference further. The composer of The Carnival of the Animals wrote The Swan, from which Fokine drew The Dying Swan for Anna Pavlova, the most famous solo in classical ballet.
And when feather replaces thread, the stage is still there: Rapace and Edwige are built like headdresses, real feathers fanned around an embroidered face.
Emergence
The white gives back, in time, what it keeps.
3 artworks
A hare in the snow, of which you first see only the tips of the ears. An ibex surfacing from a white barely lighter than the sky. A tiny robin at the edge of an empty field.
These canvases do not give themselves away. The animal has been there from the start, but it takes time to find it, and the daylight makes it appear or vanish.
Abstraction
Nothing left to recognise, everything to look at.
12 artworks
Here there is almost nothing left to recognise. Water embroidered row after row, where you think you see a photograph before you start counting the stitches. Discs of leather and satin set on painted skies.
Flowers turned to pure texture, white on white or black on black, catching the light as you walk past and going out when you stop.
Some keep a motif, a clover, a bouquet, but set down in a floating, almost unreal world.
Wall structures
The material steps out of the frame.
4 artworks
A single material, gathered, stitched, mounted on a bare ground. Nothing else.
A square of burgundy leather whose folds hold the light and shift with the hour. A rectangle of organza that keeps the memory of every crease.
These are not abstractions: they are drapery. Which is to say costume, hung and emptied of its body. The circle closes back on the stage, by another route.
Craft in full view
Thread becomes feather, petal and fur.
11 artworks
In the other worlds, technique disappears behind the effect. Here, it is the subject.
Gold flowers worked with the Lunéville hook on black canvas. An eighty-centimetre mandala built in crowns of appliqué. A coat embroidered hair by hair. Hundreds of flowers sewn one at a time, no two alike.
This is the direct inheritance of the École Lesage: embroidery made to be seen and admired as embroidery. What a couture house lays on a gown, he lays on a stretcher.
Let the eye adjust: the bird arrives slowly, like nightfall.
Discover the works to come
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