When the worst befalls you
by Diane Watteau, September 2024
An ostracon is a shard of pottery used in Ancient Greece to exile a person for political or moral reasons, or for treason. Engraved writings and drawings have been found on this ritual banishment object. The artist Monique Gies made her work an act of ostracism.
Monique Gies’s paintings and portraits are presented for the first time in the ex- hibition The silenced words at Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, from October 5 to November 2, 2024. This event follows her daughter’s discovery of around a hundred of the artist’s pieces after her death.
In 1977, at the age of 43, M.G. suddenly abandoned her comfortable family life to shut herself away in a Parisian bedsit. Her decision to withdraw and paint kept her out of psychiatric care. M.G. anticipated that the worst was yet to come. She vehemently questioned not only her family life but also a traumatic event suppressed from long ago; her rape as a young girl by an uncle who bore the foreboding nickname of “NonNon”. The affable uncle had an enduring presence. The small (27 cm x 37 cm) acrylic or watercolour paintings are not conventional images. Herself-portraits seek an edge or a frame. They multiply, cutting across and through. Sketches reveal objects – here, a colourful rocking horse and an off-white shirt – printed on her retina and then in her memory, which most likely served as a visual anchor during the attack.
Alone, relentlessly alone, in her cold and muddy frame, the heroine appears, like a creature from beyond the grave, to posthumously recognise a motionless, life- less object on the paper: a body. Drawn from her traumatic experience and the lingering memories, each painting, like an interval of terror, features a particular sentence. Despite their differences, each piece is haunted, literally, by collapse. In these little theatres, the crime coalesces with brutality. Neither beautiful, nor realistic, the original figuration haunts the artist’s mind. This is not about the authority of good drawing or artistic principles. The pieces embody a vital need in a sepia world. The expressionless colour is tempered in subdued assortments of mostly browns and blues. Amid a lack of contrast, the subject sometimes sinks into the background. The painting process appears erased, washed out or midway through dyeing or bleaching. The many expressionless colours seem to border on greyscale. M.G.’s painting is like a sort of blackout.
The drawing employs lines and surfaces to create split, broken or incomplete portraits of the artist. Torn, slashed and shattered like a doll thrown to the ground. The doll creature needs support. Here, fragile scaffolding surrounds her, like props keeping her upright. But she’s not soft. She’s solid but dislocated. She no longer defies the laws of balance. The body is no longer standing. It is split open, broken apart, smashed and blown to pieces like a puppet.
The portrait: a bodyless head. A headless body is erased like an interchangeable partial object. The victim is annihilated. The presence of the uninhabited and the lifeless in an apparent anaesthesia presents M.G. as an accessory in Unheimliche (1) . The doll is like a separation.
“They mean no no no no no no no help the blind baby poor little girl help help no no no no...” (2).
M.G.’s work is a poignant call.
The fear comes through in the remnants of an invasion by a “foreign body”– through a half-open door, an adult body watches –, any slight hope of action from them is now “stopped in its tracks” or somehow neutralised in the image. M.G.’s images are inextricably linked to the words that she cannot say. Untranslatable words. These are paintings to both see and hear. Derrida3 evokes “an affair of sonority, of tone, of intonation, of thunder and of detonation in Artaud’s painting”. M.G.’s painting elicits a strength in conflict with form: the seismic event she experienced. The motifs burst out of a long-suppressed as- sault. This dark violence is no longer a part of her.
The spectator’s head pounds to a death fugue. It exhausts the mystery. This psy- chography includes us in the imaginary world of combinations hungering for fantasy.
Now separated from herself, the artist and her counter-spells topple the story. “Did he really hurt you?” (4)
Deep six. (5)
All of these images are an exappropriation(6). Like an ostracon, each of these paintings depicts a decision to step out of her own story and eject the crime that remains within.
Diane Watteau is an artist, associate professor and lecturer in visual arts at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, along with being an art critic and inde- pendent curator.
Monique Gies (1934-2022) was 43 years old when she abruptly decided to leave her husband, children, and bourgeois life as a school principal in Strasbourg to isolate herself in a maid’s room in Paris. She immediately created a significant series of small-format works that evoke the incest she suffered as a child. She also began therapy, frequented feminist circles, and contributed to the magazine Sorcières in 1978-1979, where she was featured in the exhibition of nineteen women artists or- ganized by Sorcières in 1979.
This body of work was discovered only after M.G.’s death and has never been shown to the public. It will be exhibited for the first time at Galerie Christophe Gaillard from October 5 to November 2, 2024, and will be the subject of a publication edited by the gallery.
(1) “Unheimliche” or “the uncanny”, a term coined by Sigmund Freud, is a feeling of unease when things evoke a sense of strangeness in us: “The class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar.”
(2) Alasdair Gray, Poor Things, 2024.
(3) Jacques Derrida, “Artaud and his doubles”, Scènes Magazines n°5, Fe- bruary 1987. Interview with Jean-Mi- chel Olivier (AESD).
(4) Donatien Aldonze François de Sade, Juliette or Vice Amply Rewarded, Complete Works, 1987.
(5) Sailor slang: send something or someone overboard which or who rises to the surface.
(6) “Resolving the conflict between appropriation and expropriation” in Echographies of Television, interviews between J.Derrida and B. Stiegler, Paris, 1996.
