RHAPSODIE DE PAPIER

The World's Discretion (Sylvain Huard's Review) The baroque aesthetic sealed the image of a world in perpetual motion, aiming to highlight what was perceived as a foundational paradox of humanity: the coexistence of permanence and the ephemeral or, to glimpse it differently, in a Baudelairean sense, the permanence of the ephemeral. Among all its challenges, art seems not to have set aside this quest to make visible, tangible, audible the tension between what endures and what passes, between what is and what appears, between the one and the multiple, playing the tightrope walker on the more or less taut wire of the present and its disturbances. A few centuries later, during which the notion of unity, centralization, absoluteness, attempted to impose itself, the writer Italo Calvino, during a conference in 1967, evokes the revenge of divisibility, of what the members of the OuLiPo, mathematicians and poets, then named 'combinatorics,' a revenge on everything that is of the order of continuity, fluidity, linearity. Emphasizing the discontinuity of the world, he then affirms its discretion, in the mathematical sense of the term: '... il mondo nei suoi vari aspetti viene visto sempre più come discreto e non come continuo'. Caleme's works are, in our view, inscribed in this contemporary philosophy of the world, with the exception that discretion here is adorned with an evident polysemy. First, the discretion in action in Caleme's work seems to be linked to the etymology of the term, borrowed from the late Latin discretio, translating to 'division,' 'separation.' It actually takes on the guise of finitude. We emphasize it without originality: each work, while being part of a whole, is a work in itself. It's the principle of the pomegranate, the quintessential baroque fruit: it owes what it is to all the seeds that constitute it. Thus, if music is the guiding thread of the exhibition, each of Caleme's works can be isolated because it remains a distinct entity. The composition 'Inscape,' dominated by the conductor, for example, remains indeed an autonomous opus, as do the dancing figures that occupy the entire space of certain small canvases such as 'Ephemeral Elegance' and 'Dream Shards.' And so on for all creations. But let's return to the unity of this exhibition. From one wall to another, operating as a refrain, the subject of the opera-ballet sets the tone, without the creations losing their own sonorities. In this sense, once again, the figure of the conductor with a suspended gesture, a major figure by size and intensity, seemingly drawing energy from within to transmit to the orchestra, fits perfectly with these bodies clothed in dancing movements that the smaller formats - 'Celestial Serenade,' 'Mystical Inebriation'... - isolate with real grace. It all orchestrates itself. And, from movement to movement, the artist creates his world, creates a world that the Visual Symphony materializes. Movement, precisely... Discretion is also the ability to know how to act while striving not to interfere. This characteristic often requires the capacity to step back, to remain in the background at times, to undertake a movement that contributes to the peace of conversations, to the balance of situations. Balance... Caleme's work is its manifestation. Dark lines merge with the whiteness of the paper, golden touches extend the shadows of the bodies, glued origamis accentuate the relief specific to the paper, while the cutouts reveal the creative potential of this material, in the tradition of Japanese and Chinese cultures. Asian philosophies, moreover, highlighted well before the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, i.e., well before European Baroque, the complexity of the world and of men, both governed by paradox and in perpetual search for a balance, if not a saving one at least a repairing one. For the former, nature takes care of it as much as man allows it; for the latter, they strive for it, not without difficulty, through science and the arts. These are movements that transcend eras, like airs that weave through branches, animating them with a constantly renewed breath and voice. Let us remember this short text from the classical Chinese poet Wang Po dedicated to the 'wind' which 'comes and goes, but leaves no trace, / Rises and calms, as if it had feelings...,' which 'gives rise to... a voice in the pines.' Momentum and repose, silence and murmuring, nature and humanity... and a world born from this balance: that of Caleme. The poetry of his works is part of this ancestral harmony. It readily unfolds in terms of sweetness, of sought-after serenity... in appearances. Because, as with reality, upon closer observation, upon reflection, there are roughnesses there... with the difference being that they are all discreet here. A mystique transcends them, more precisely 'Mystical Inebriations.' And if the collages of origamis, wings or petals, reveal, sideways or through shadows, edges, points... we are not however in the universe of Safaa Erruas, even though, beyond the predominance of whiteness, a similar understanding of the world and an apprehension of what makes us human might be revealed... in appearances. 'Sideways' we just wrote... It is indeed often interesting to take this step aside to observe artworks, to walk around them or simply to scrutinize the thickness above the canvas. The creations thus enrich themselves with the spectator's movement. And this offers new perspectives, as if Caleme's works aspired, through the relief of glued or cut and then raised paper, to become something else, like the ceramics of the artist Eric Broug. The drawings come to life, the form trying to escape the drawing, the paper emancipating from the form and the light ultimately emerging from the paper. Caleme, like the poet Théophile Gautier in his time, thus dedicates his art to 'a major white symphony' that rises above what is, joining Marina Tsvetaeva's idea of poetry: 'starting from the earth - it's the first millimeter of air above it.' And in this millimeter 'above,' the secrets of the presences that humanize Caleme's creations whisper... Discretion: the quality of a person who knows how to keep a secret. Drawing, painting, are artistic incarnations of it. Beyond frozen moments, narrative threads are woven from one work to another, from works to spectators, from Caleme to his works and his audience. Each interpretation, linked to feeling, then borders on the secret, impressions that individualize us, identify us, even if words, on the canvases themselves, are used to explain, translate thought, share feeling. In the interstices of words, in the heart of silences that punctuate the said, in the shadow of words, the intimate beats. The characters drawn by Caleme accentuate this secret. Who did she want to represent? Did she want to represent specific people? Does she bring to life beings she has encountered? Are they the product of her imagination alone? Do they signify?... What life animates them? What bonds connect them if any, beyond the musical theme? Such a dancer, what music gives her that swirling force? Towards what world does the man from 'Spiral Flight' seem to propel himself to the point of becoming an angel? And this being born from movement, in 'Field of Change 4,' curled up like a fetus, already a man, what future will he build, what future can he still shape? Humanity-laden secrets, all these characters share the questions they raise and the potentialities they embody. Because they are indeed starting points, despite their finitude, their completion, that Caleme's creations propose. They are promises, propulsions, elevations even if they are internal or within the confined framework of the instantaneous. The in-finite... 'Opera aperta,' 'open work,' to borrow another expression from Umberto Eco, open works like literary works, open to all possibilities. At discretion, meaning as much as one wants, with all the desirable abundance. Albert Camus writes: 'No one more than I desired harmony, abandonment, definitive balance, but I always had to strive for it through the steepest paths, disorder, struggles.' Would Caleme make these words her own? The very idea of tension, like a taut rope ready to deliver its note, is at the heart of her compositions. All her works multiply this energy. They are impulses of life as much as pulsations. One finds all the wisdom of Asia, condensed in the immaculate and the line, inheritance from Bashō, which more contemporary Japanese poets like Ishi Kanta know how to perpetuate in haikus: 'On the white peony / an insect lands — / final stroke.' With the exception that chance does not play a role in Caleme's art, that the insect does not simply land on the flower. There is a reason. The stroke is never truly final: 'open work,' opera aperta... Even the use of gilding, if it brings to mind the art of kintsugi, which prolongs the life of broken objects by giving them new life, it differs in its purpose here since the golden touches are brought to compositions that did not previously exist, which need to flourish for the first and definitive time. As for the stroke we left pending, it itself responds to an intention: not only does it allow the theme of the opera-ballet to take shape, to embody it in its main motifs, but it also sublimates the artist's relationship to reality. Drawing indeed allows to give shape to the energy of bodies... liberated from gravity... and not without humor. In this theatrum mundi, in this theater of the world, the 'paper rhapsody' that is her work, as Caleme calls it, lets all its chords be heard, with a discretion defined in terms of restraint and wisdom. The human comedy is not denounced, it is simply touched by the fingertips, left to the discretion of, to the judgment of the spectator. Caleme, on the other hand, sticks to smiling at the world and tries to transcribe its beauties through her paper sculptures, in symbiosis with the nature that her work prolongs, 'Garden Side - [a] Vegetal Symphony.' There is therefore much more than material and motifs. A breath, a vibration. When the poet - and ambassador - Paul Claudel returns from China, his attention is drawn to what, in the poem, is something other than meaning. He writes: 'The poem is not made of those letters that I plant like nails, but of the white that remains on the paper.' In Caleme's creations, even the white does not make the work; it delivers its shadows, its presences. It marks the imprint of the world's movements that the artist manages to capture... its sacred geometry... with all humility, all lightness, all discretion. Sylvain HUARD, Art Critique"