It would be like a dream. The luxuriant and infinitely renewed nature would unfold before our eyes its treasures of inventive brilliance. Color would invade our life, reaching even the most remote corners of our consciousness. Everything would be illuminated.
Yes, if one could evolve at the heart of Alexandra De Grave’s paintings, venture into them “physically” after having immersed one’s gaze, it would be like a dream, one would not want to leave, captivated by the immense peace that reigns there, by the beauty that emanates from it. Like a bucolic dream that would bring us back to the blessed times of childhood, when every discovery absorbed us to the point that the surroundings offered no resistance, disappearing instantly.
I do not ignore that we are not taught to dream, or very little. We are told that we must advance in life with full awareness, in cold realism, and guard against illusions that could distract us from the right path… So we close the hatches, lock our hearts, take refuge in narrow constraints and give up our reason rather than our deepest aspirations…
Yet, it only takes one encounter for the troublesome creases of these dubious habits to vanish. Around the corner of an art gallery, for example, seeing a painting. Approaching. And there, touching with the tip of one’s eyes an unknown, enchanting universe. Slipping in incognito.
One must immerse oneself in the pictorial luxuriance of Alexandra De Grave. Draw from the abundance of matter, from these impressions that are like miraculous herbariums, the poetic rhythms that speak of the breeze, the fragrant foliage, the tiny life. Nestled in these paintings is the beating heart of the marvelous. The delightful sensation that the universe is a territory of infinite exploration offered to our curiosity, that it would be possible to live there permanently, far from the darkness of time.
At the sight of these ardent visions where the vegetal draws the contours of parallel and mysterious universes, the mind takes a different path. It is the great escape. One extricates oneself from the miasma of the present. A happy diversion. One immerses oneself in a painting that reflects a reality both fantasized and multiple. And one enters, perhaps without fully realizing it, into resistance.
Ludovic Duhamel – Editor-in-chief of Miroir de l’Art magazine.
