"For nearly forty years, a network of complex relationships has been woven between the artist and the work. Their "deciphering" can sometimes seem difficult, but it is essential to the understanding of a major component of our perceptive life. "It is not thinking that is marvelous, but thinking in a head". This thought of Derrida seems to take on meaning here in the exhibition of the works of Françoise Carrasco.
This solitary artist is the sculptor of obscure and overwhelming revelations. Austerity and intensity characterize these poignant figures of truth. Françoise Carrasco apprehends the elusiveness of the fragility and strength of the human condition. The visitor that we are is confronted with it and recognizes ourselves in it, perceiving the extraordinary presence of our own condition, our daily life, our sensuality, our anxieties. These mirrors reflect back to us the image of our joys and our sorrows as we would never have dared to conceive it.
The human body is at the center of Françoise Carrasco's universe.
Like the remains of Roman Emperors or ancient Venuses found buried under some Parthenon or the walls of Rome, the artist's creatures have been deprived of hands. And feet too. Why? Why this amputation? This mutilation? Two worlds on earth and in the earth.
No wonders to be expected from Françoise Carrasco's creatures. The artist keeps the wonder of creation to herself. The hand is the artist's hand. "The hand that gives". Paradoxically, it is Françoise Carrasco's hand that signs this deprivation. She had to mistreat these bodies to see beyond. See beyond the inhuman, the human.
When we look at Françoise Carrasco's women, we are struck by the aesthetic concern of the costume. To the profound melancholy of the subject, the teenagers, young girls, young women oppose by their sophisticated outfits a lightness or even a certain futility. Beautiful and serious. Yet tragic things happen to these women to whom the artist always returns through these sculptures. Some great misfortune, some fatal discovery that freezes his visitors in catatonic poses, under the shock of an almost dissolving surprise, endowed with the disturbing power to spread to anyone who is absorbed in the contemplation of the sculptor's works.
Finally, hands! Hands that touch, that touch each other. "No touch please", "On ne touche pas", this is what we are accustomed to seeing in museums, exhibitions. Yet what do these characters do, if not touch each other? These hands here bear witness more to questioning than to caressing. Who am I? But Valery's "hand, organ of possibility and positive certainty" becomes for Françoise Carrasco the organ of uncertainty.
The very material, very matter hands coincide with the body they cover. Through his hand the artist thinks of the hand as a reality that constitutes in itself a sort of consubstantial partner.
From this astonishing gallery of portraits chosen and modeled by the artist, emanates from their appearance the philosophical questioning, that of the origin. We find again the question of “who am I?”. The face is the space where passions are painted. “The human face has not yet found its face (...) which means that the human face, such as it is, is still searching for itself with eyes, a nose, a mouth and two ear cavities” wrote Antonin Artaud in 1947. The insistent expression of these faces is very studied.
Transported into matter, the physiognomy of the creatures never encloses the humanity of a true face ordered according to an expressive requirement, intensified by a deformation eager for truth.
Every day, the contemporary world gives color a more important place. Between Françoise Carrasco and color, a network of complex relationships is thus woven. Color, freeing itself from matter, rediscovers the human body. The artist has subtly achieved this essential solidarity of color with its material support. Color is irruption, dynamism of life, the flesh of the world. The eye of flesh has thus created the space of singularity that will be the privileged place of our mediation.
The unity of Françoise Carrasco's work is admirable. Seeing requires discipline and modesty. We must agree to venture outside of ourselves. We must be receptive. Not refuse what the work can have to give. Françoise Carrasco offers us the reconciliation of art with the human adventure.
Catherine Cazeaux, Philosopher