Annie Hémond-Hotte

Inside the immediacy of painting, I cast a world, a “mise en scène” filled with assemblages of situations framing characters made out of costumes, animals, collection of objects, figurines, Art, still lives, inventions… If the characters walked out of the paintings you would find them uncomfortably between abstraction and figuration, made out of paint; caught in a moment surrounded sometimes by speed, sometime by stillness. Stuck in the Jekyll/Hyde syndrome, these Dandies exist on a stage set with both humour and anxiety, between sadness and a melancholic laugh. It is as if these Bipolar scenes are put under a spotlight, as if the spectator had just arrived in a specific time of the action and caught them. The tableaux exist only in that specific moment. The paintings could be a documentation of some “almost staged” situations. They are framing some interactions between characters, objects and an indecisive space, questioning some melancholic cultural references.

Combining different nostalgic painting languages with a little laissez-faire, I am embracing my own romance with the “idea” of Painting while accepting the joke and the exaggeration that come out of it. The presence of the painter as the creator of the paintings is omnipresent. We can almost imagine the hand of the painter moving around the painting executing the image on the canvas. Half-improvising what could become a new piece of a much bigger world. In these situations the criticality is discussed with the mediation of a humorous tone. This world presented on the canvas is interested in asking whether pretending has become the new philosophy of life, or a simple way to embrace what it’s fancied to become. Could the human mind be compared to an architectural shape, structure, or methodology? How much is the process of assembling “yourself” sincere? And is it possible to embody a certain comedy? Through these painterly characters on whom a humorous and fictional reputation is imposed, I am proposing the choice of doing something “for real” and pretending to do so. What is the limit? And what if staging honesty is a part of being honest? Is the mask of pretending suppressive, protective, or a way to allow us to be more ourselves — ¬as in a masquerade?

Can pretending, in the end, become honesty? If an artist of our time wants to wear the nostalgic “costume” of the painter, does it make him more of a painter because he wants to believe he is one? In two words, the paintings test the authentic cliché.

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