BRUSSELS.- At first glance one is startled by the impromptu look of these works. Clearly, the artist’s manner of occupying emptiness and animating the support (the subjectile) stems from precise gestures, both free and calculated. The experience of tracing traverses these images. The artist follows her own tracks. She establishes a “theme,” loses its thread, finds it again.

The composition of these images never overwhelms what surges forth with and within the drawing. Each separate moment is the start of a narrative, yet it’s also a way of sidestepping that narrative — we notice this in her films; every start is liable to be revisited, reworked. Drawing organizes more or less legible éléments by remaining as close as possible to a psychographic activity, one that manifests first and foremost as a transcription of kinesthetic sensations. The commonplace view of drawing as a form of bodily writing is constantly borne out.

The chronological order we follow here allows the reader to track the artist’s approach to color, her shift from the pencil stroke to the painted image, the experience of grotesque polychromy, the emergence of solid luminous blue planes associated with a burlesque assemblage of figures. This overall movement is unquestionably one of the keys to Anne-Marie Schneider’s artistic work and biography.

Schneider’s first consummate experiments in 1988 seek to record movement and the body — the image of the body — in motion. She sought to express the element that imbues this experience with its impersonal yet intimate content — the “auto-affection of life,” as physiologists term it. In her drawings (tracings), she thinks in terms of moments and spatial relationships. Initially it is not continuity or duration that matters to her; her thinking is grounded in points, lines, and planes. Every trace on a blank page is the inscription of a movement she might return to on another sheet. The finished drawing is a temporary stopping point, a point the artist takes stock of and at the same time views as the index of an imaginary geometry: line as an extension of point, a projection of point onto plane. Energy and tension are what matter in these drawings. They make the point invisible.

Anne-Marie Schneider was born in 1961 in Chauny (F), lives and works in Paris.

Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia (E) shows a retrospective of her works till march 2017. In the autumn of this year MAC’s – Musée des Arts Contemporains of Grand Hornu (B) will organize a major solo show.

She also has exhibited at Documenta X à Kassel (1993), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (solo in 2003 and 2008), Musée Het Domein Sittaard (NL), Prix Marcel Duchamp (F), Prix Daniel and Florence Guerlain (F)

Her Works are in the following public collections : Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (F), Centre Pompidou (F), Musée des Arts Contemporains - Site du Grand-Hornu (B), Musée national d'Art moderne (F), Fonds national d'art contemporain (F), FRAC Haute Normandie (F), FRAC Picardie (F), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (F), Museum Het Domein, Sittard (NL), Museum Overholland, Amsterdam (NL), Yale University Art Gallery (USA), The Morgan Library & Museum (USA)


Extract from the text by Jean-François Chevrier in the monography editions L ‘Arachnéen. -2016- trilingual (french, spanish, english)- 280 pages, 310 images ; 1 DVD with 4 films - 26 x 20,5 cm – ISBN 9782373670042 –
price : 39 EUR – available at the gallery and at Peinture Fraîche Library in Brussels.