Captures éditions

Le Piège (The Trap), Valérie du Chéné & Arlette Farge, 2022

A new milestone in a fruitful dialogue begun in 2014; in Le Piège (The Trap), Valérie du Chéné presents a series of black and white drawings accompanied by newspaper headlines (cut and recomposed) in a reaction to press articles. Arlette Farge “catches” these drawings and titles “in flight”, seized by their “social and political momentum”; the writing flows with seriousness and empathy, sketching the ordinary and sometimes tragic lives of men and women – taking a look at a changing world.

The open confrontation of text/ drawing – like two alterities ­– one of which does not necessarily match the other; of drawings and titles that at times, take on a mysterious character and invite everyone to make their way and to summon their own images and memories of ordinary and political moments.

Valérie du Chéné (born in 1974) is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. She teaches at the Institut supérieur des arts et du design in Toulouse (isdaT). Her work, in its various forms of painting, sculpture, installation and drawing, has as its backbone the question of encounter and confrontation with the other and/or with space (both public and exhibition space). Du Chéné recently exhibited at the Musée régional d’art contemporain (Mrac) Occitanie and the Chapelle Saint-Jacques centre d’art contemporain de Saint-Gaudens. Her work is in the collections of Abattoirs-Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse, Frac Corse, Frac Occitanie Montpellier, Frac-Artothèque Limousin and the Musée régional d’art contemporain (Mrac) Occitanie.
www.valerieduchene.com
https://ddaoccitanie.org/fr/artistes/valerie-du-chene/oeuvres

Arlette Farge (born in 1941) is a research director at CNRS and a specialist in the 18th century. Across numerous works, she studies the hidden face and restores the ordinary life of people who were not considered as “subjects” of History; Farge is interested in “small intensities”, in micro-history. Her latest book, Vie oubliées. Au cœur du xviii^e siècle (Forgotten Lives. In the heart of the 18th Century), was published by La Découverte in 2019.