Absolue de rose

Active since the mid-1990s, Virginie Barré has developed a world in which theatrical staging plays a central role. Her practice is multidisciplinary, combining drawing, sculpture and installation, as well as comics and cinema.

Her work explores the themes of dreams, danger and the fragile boundary between reality and fiction. Nourished by historical and artistic references, her approach stands out for its subtle irony, giving rise to scenes of suspended tragedy in which death and the grotesque intertwine.

Her work proceeds from a particularly agile and fertile reworking of forms and narratives, in a joyful and colourful approach to abstraction that is always open to new readings and temporalities.

Her practice is therefore in close dialogue with cinema. Films such as Le rêve géométrique (The Geometric Dream) and Nos corps sont des rivières (Our Bodies Are Rivers) (2022) offer an expanded vision of geometric abstraction, in the spirit of a musical, sometimes recalling Jacques Demy or Shana Moulton. They feature a very colourful world, crossed by geometric forms, ballets and costumes, in an aesthetic that also echoes the spirit of the Bauhaus, based on a simple formal vocabulary and primary colours. Setting forms in motion, activating them, is thus a central principle of her work.

This principle continues in the exhibition Absolue de rose, for which the artist has designed a project in resonance with the site, responding in particular to Gilles Clément’s landscape work in the park.

In the vocabulary of perfumery, the title Absolue de rose (rose absolute) refers to the most concentrated essence, patiently extracted from the flower. In Mouans-Sartoux, the May rose was grown for its rare fragrance, from which the absolute – that pure, dense extract – was obtained. Seeds, flowers and plant forms have run through the artist’s practice for several years. She picks them, paints them, collects them and depicts them, preserving the memory of living things, of gesture and of time.

New soft fabric figures, in the tradition of her mannequins from the 2000s, appear under the title Les sentinelles de la joie (The Sentinels of Joy). Talismans bearing the colours of a musical, La plage des dames (The Ladies’ Beach) – currently being written – appear, while necklaces of cut or oversized paper unfold their rhythms and variations. Painted garment-works, for studio work as well as for going to the beach, punctuate the ensemble. Watercolour drawings develop in echo of the artists Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Charlotte Perriand and Valentine Schlegel.

This back-and-forth process gives rise to modules at the crossroads of sculpture and installation, resonating with her research into costume, dance and cinema.

Absolue de rose is rooted in the history of the site, between abstraction and sensory experience. For the exhibition, the artist has developed new pieces in collaboration with Lucy Morrow, ceramicist, and René Barré, her father, who made terracotta beads and turned wooden pieces.

Deeply inspired by the Albers-Honegger collection, Virginie Barré also wished, “in her own way of working with the living, with colours and materials”, to punctuate her proposal with a selection of works, engaging a fruitful dialogue between her practice and the collection, notably with women artists such as Meret Oppenheim, Aurelie Nemours, Sonia Delaunay and Marcelle Cahn, with attention paid to fields that are sometimes overlooked, such as the decorative arts, illustration and the applied arts.

Absolue de rose offers a mix of genres in which the domestic rubs shoulders with art, and everyday life is closely intertwined with artistic practice, particularly when one is an artist, a woman and a mother. The exhibition promises to be a particularly vibrant proposal, rich in new perspectives.

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