AVANT DE VOIR LE JOUR

The Museum of Old Nîmes is the setting for a posthumous pairing between emerging textile artist Jeanne Vicerial and the celebrated painter who recently passed away: Pierre Soulages. The painter’s research was particularly important to Jeanne Vicerial. Upon discovering his work, she realized that black, when combined with repetitive gestures, opens infinite possibilities. For it is not about black in the end, but about light and doors to other worlds.  In this unprecedented face-to-face encounter, Jeanne Vicerial pays tribute to the master in the city where he passed away. Several of their works engage in dialogue within a multisensory installation she created entirely on site, and which required her to live in the museum for a month with her team and fashion students from High school Ernest Hemingway in Nîmes. The experience is as much about rebirth and metamorphosis as it is about the state of anteriority that precedes birth, the last memory before life begins. Feminine presences and Outrenoirs punctuate this journey from white to black and back again, highlighting the many parallels between the two artists’ practices. The threads and furrows created by the brush sometimes appear to interchange. Here, they embody both the passage of time and the fragility of destinies.