An uncanniness of being. Agnès Baillon’s works are tinged with the Freudian concept of “unheimlichkeit”. Her portraits are imbued with disruption of the senses, with jumbled tactility, with human intrigue, and thus propel us to some other planet. A planet full of torsos, of steles. And a great deal of faces. Faces that destabilize, that unsettle. That astound. Faces that bring about out transformation. And that revive. Because these faces gaze into their ‘inner space’. Their sculpted traits reveal the self’s ‘double’, the soul that used to haunt Henri Michaux.

Agnès Baillon uses resin, and lately bronze, for her immersion inside this frenzy of figures. Poignant angels with fragile expressions. Artless girls, their heads out of proportion like baby dolls. Off-beat beauty queens, or awkward dancers. They are always sincere, sometimes anxious, often questioning… A childlike dreamy whirl. And the body? Utterly naked. White. Translucent. Evanescent. Unless it wears a garment that seems to merge with the flesh. Now and again, with uncommon grace and candor, it coyly dons a headdress or a strip of lace. It is no mere chance, but rather for the sake of rigour, focus, monumentality and timelessness, that the artist draws inspiration from Degas, Dürer, La Tour, the Flemish school, and a recent trip to Egypt. In search of eternal Beginnings.

And yet. The silence, the suspension of gestures and time, are intertwined with uneasiness, anguish, tension, wildness. Yes, also wildness. For here as well, this former student of Cremonini is steeped in current events, and she explores and grasps humankind’s various states. Life, death, terror, violence, pain, the uncontrolled and uncontrollable ebb and flow. Extremes and ambiguities force and tenderness, void and fulfilment, clashing against one another and then joining, out of her love of spontaneity. Which explains her passion for modelling and her zest for desanctification. She has desanctified oil paint and is now doing the same to bronze. Agnès Baillon’s fingers have fun, they jiggle. They provoke. With the intelligence and malice. But how does the artist dare approach bronze, its classicism, its patina? Precisely. To experience it, mistreat it, force something out of it that is not merely expected and traditional. With a clear and steady hand, she shapes the material, paints and repaints it, wears it down, in order to infuse this inert matter with Life.

“The way I militate is by creating marginal people”, she says, looking at her sculptures. This “marginality”, this otherness buried inside each one of us. This intimacy that disturbs and frightens. Reveals. The best and the worst. Agnès Baillon or emotion. Intense.

Anne Kerner
Journalist and member of the International Association of Art Critics (A.I.C.A.)

* From the catalogue of Agnès Baillon’s exhibition, Ekfrasi – Yianna Grammatopoulou Gallery, Athens, 2003.