Double V Gallery is delighted to present Alice Guittard’s first solo show in France - échec — plaisir

May 3

Written By Roy Owh

Double V Gallery

Open by appointment from Tues. May 10, 2021

Public Opening Saturday May 22, 2021

28 rue St-Jacques 13006 Marseille - FR

They are not a pair of passively identical twins. (...) The left one, this hand that unjustly points to the wrong side of life. (...) Built like the other, it has the same aptitudes, which it renounces to help it. (...) It is a happiness that we do not have two right hands. (...) If it were otherwise, we would be submerged by an awful excess of virtuosity. We would probably have pushed the art of juggling to its extreme limits - and probably nothing more.

Tirelessly, the two jugglers get down to their task. Like a ballet that nothing alters, separated (linked) at most by a cadratin: failure - pleasure. In the singular, like two beings of an inseparable couple. To the veins of the marbles answer the lines of the hands, they testify of our previous lives, of distant inheritances and of futures to be made; as much failure yesterday as pleasure tomorrow.

Together they activate themselves, in the Florentine way, in a new dialectic, that of eyes and hands, of seeing and doing. To select in the chance of the beauty of the stones to transcribe the decomposed image. Alice Guittard, for her first solo exhibition presents five new images in marble inlay, a technique discovered during Ottoman wanderings.

Five stagings of those who have shaped them: the hands, left and right, which hold, unite, caress, or through which water slides. Instants frozen in image, sublimated by the light, locked in the heart of the stone. Not in the simplification, not in the loss, rather in the precise memory.

Together they imagine, as if to read in the forms of the clouds. The interweaving of each of the stones is comparable to the photographic process. Like the childish pleasure of the square and the circle, it is necessary to assemble, recompose to reveal the images. Here equal to carnal temptations which moreover is within reach of hands. Predatory, these stones return us to the absence, the absence of words. They are before or after. As the mineral to the water and to the fire; in the work of Alice Guittard the literature is at the same time prequel and sequel. A tantalizing way to touch the origins or to brush with death.

To failure and pleasure, eternity.

Thomas Havet