GRAPHO-CHORE (WHEN THE DECORATIVENESS REVISITS MINIMALISM)

At the beginning there would be dance. If one had to imagine the first morning of the world, when nothing would have been elaborated yet, nor built, however, there would already be dance. There would be open space, the bodily mass of self consciousness, and the requirement of tracing a porosity between the inner of the first and the outer of the other. Acting as models, there would be the supple neckline of a snorting horse, the circular coming and going of an enchanting bird, the lateral shift of a crab… There would be the tempo of bodies, projecting their lines in the space of the world. In no time, however the chore-ography of origins already gives way to a more reflexive energy. The trace super-ceding the event, the ephemeral, embodied dynamic of dance extends in a projected inscription of the body in mass. From dance is born volume, kind of grapho-chore.

The first time I slipped under, looked over, circumvented large and small works by Juliette Jouannais, this Grapho-chore of origins seemed to slowly flourish under my eyes. No object, or no image here. Everything was as if the body, recognizing its own native dance, felt able to cast itself into the offered spatial meanders, agreeing its contradictions : both coiled and open, microscopic and macroscopic, wrapped and stripped. It seemed as if a dancing and companion organism, escaping gravity, had crystallized in suspension, expanded, or projected itself beyond the gaze of its fugitive delineation. During this more virtual than actual visionary process, a fantasized body was granted to us, a body losing its scale and its mass, a body momentarily becoming fluid and metamorphic, able to float in a bath of resolved ambivalences.