Flight

The flight ! What a magnificent title to reveal a new journey, to push further the meaning of adventure. The journey of this exhibition by Michelle Tassi presents us what overflows from the canvas, and prepares us to receive the experience of a crossing.

To restore these forms that she makes move in space, the artist will have prepared the canvas by making it a weft space and as if bathed in shades of green, mauve, brown, yellow colors from a diffused light. It is from this pedestal or carpet that the painter brings forth the figures she creates, which have become imprints and are designed to appear and rise. From these bodies, she makes choreographies composed according to the canvases, notably a setting ablaze, a solo, a duet, a stellar ballet... Here, painting and plastic gesture materialize into a writing, that of the naked body that moves in space and transcends it. It is then that another space can free itself in front of us and allow us to penetrate into an unknown made by these presences which seem to arise from the very matter of the canvas.

From the representation of these beings suddenly unfolds an unexpected world, other, and which creates an open space where the ineffable nudity of being is revealed. Look at these bodies of matter; see them come to life in the studied momentum or gravity; they curve, meet, amalgamate to end up recreating or even replaying the scenes or sequences of a creation they invent. Sometimes, they draw a floating field that composes a new social body of a ballet, sometimes they project themselves into the space and trance it. Translucent or made of material according to the paintings, they could still appear as apparitions from our buried memories.

Under her gaze, Michèle Tassi invites them to experience metamorphoses and if they attract us, pique our curiosity and make us love, it is because they seem very alive and all the more vibrant, precisely because captured in the very origin of their re-creation. And then, we could just as well incorporate them into a fable, unless history makes them palpitate through a 'gesture' that opens up to the atemporality of the body being crossed? Unless also that the scene they represent must immutably carry these bodies shaped by trance, balance and imbalance when spaces of openings and awakening are created or recreated, releasing the gesture and impulse of the moment.

Thus, what Michèle Tassi strongly shows us in these representations of the body in motion not only encompasses these anonymous bodies, these bodies of matter, clay, and light, but also restores a new body, a body unraveled from its vain tinsel, a body that escapes, rushes forward and makes us see precisely what eludes every word, even all knowledge, to live a new beginning, that of a new birth where the unprecedented journey is similar to that of flight as Michelle Tassi explores it by restoring it through pictorial form and which raises here the very essence of the transfigured body.

Florence M.-FORSYTHE, author

«I weave visual narratives where the body dances freely under the gaze of the soul.»