Following the exhibition Les mots tus, which unveiled the works of Monique Gies for the first time in October 2024, Galerie Christophe Gaillard is delighted to collaborate with the Madrid-based gallery The Goma for the exhibition Anagnorisis.
In 1977, at the age of 43, Monique Gies, a wife, mother of four and principal of a school in Strasburg, abandoned her home, out of the blue, leaving behind a comfortable bourgeois life and the religious and moral conservatism of Alsace to live in a tiny chambre de bonne in Paris. Forty-five years later, following her death in 2022, when her children were going through her belongings, on a shelf they came across a hundred or so paintings, some of which they had casually spotted before on their visits over the years. On realizing what she discovered, her daughter Marie-Christine kept asking herself “how is it possible that I had seen it all without actually seeing it […] It’s not as if she hadn’t said anything. It’s not something she hid from us. They were there for everyone of us to see.”
On first sight, Monique Gies’s work has dreamlike echoes and surrealist overtones; and yet, the visual resources she used were too insightful to conceal their intense symbolic load. Her earliest works were small-format paintings on paper and canvas in pinkish hues that later evolved towards more orangish tones, though equally evoking the colour of flesh. There was also a notable use of blues and greys that, when taken together with the browns in her late works, create the tones that best capture shadows. Her scenes depict oppressive interiors in which dismembered, expressionless dolls speak of trauma. Self-portraiture is a recurrent motif: a dogged exploration of the empty void left by childhood and its enduring mnemonic traces.
This regression Gies set out on involved a process of erasure and fragmentation of the form in which the head is severed from the body. “A bodiless head: that is what a portrait is. A headless body fades away like an incomplete, substitutable object.”(1) In her work, the multiple reflections and splittings sometimes coincide with their present phenomenological field. There is something spectral in one of her canvases, in which her daughters, sitting around a table, surround a bust of the mother. Although the figures are faceless, the sense of sadness is palpable. One of them holds out a hand towards her in a gesture seeking contact or of invocation. In another work, a liquescent figure shrouded in a transparent veil appears to make physical contact with her more corporeal image, an impossibility that holds out the promise of truth even though it may not always be redemptive.
Monique Gies first engaged with painting shortly before she fled from Strasburg, though she would do so with more intensity once in Paris during the process of psychoanalysis she undertook between 1977 and 1978. It was during this period that, for the first time, the memory of the incest committed by her uncle in her grandparents’ house surfaced—at an age when she was not yet aware of her own sexuality. Some of the depicted elements, like the rocking horse, were the visual anchors that the young Monique fixed on during the abuse. It appears in a gloomy interior with a paradoxically liberating image reflected in the window. Which is more truthful, the smudged wooden horse in the foreground or the bright shining steed galloping outside? There is no room for optimism: the pronounced shadow of the rocking motion tells us that there is no escaping the past.
Very often, this despairing iconography is layered with powerful Christian imagery. Born to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, the painter was brought up with stern religious discipline. We can see a cross in the sticks supporting puppet heads or in window mullions. Her body is shown as redemptive at the back of a canvas, or consecrated when included in an altarpiece. In these paintings—which we assume to be later works—what we see is no longer the dismembered doll but the adult body and the mature face of the artist reverberating in the glass. At times, Monique’s figure is seen with its back to us, wearing a turban unmistakably reminiscent of Ingres’s bather, in colours that seem to replicate the morphology of the brain.
In this painterly adventure that originated in fracture and inner exile, Gies does not reconstruct a linear narrative but instead assembles fragments of memory, the body and history in images that linger, return and confront. Her work does not seek to delimit and define meaning but to open it up: like a wound that never fully heals, like a truth that can barely be caressed. In this tension between the visible and the veiled, Gies makes painting a place of intimate resistance.
(1) Watteau, Diane (2024). Monique Gies, Les mots tus. Galerie Christophe Gaillard.
