Sarah Jérôme — Tempus Fugit — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 16 → April 27, 2019

Here, a horde of feet and legs wearing half-slips tread upon a wooden floor covered in red and pink flowers. The anonymous figures seem caught in a cheerful race, an audacious escape. Over there, men in costumes carry two women in the air. The brilliance of their shoe’s black leather is in sharp contrast to the pale flesh of the bare legs. Of these faceless characters that populate the Fugue series, we will know nothing. Indeed, it is not their identity that interests Sarah Jérôme but what the images symbolizes: the movement of bodies, the physical effort, a race against time tinted with nostalgia. The intention of the artworks, present implicitly, becomes secondary compared to the reframing process performed by the artist. Urging the eye to focus on a precise detail, she suspends the time of action and shifts the meaning of the source-image so as to question our own interpretation. The off-screen, the backstage, therefore become the place for new distorted perceptions of the subject.

The works from the Solace series tell us simultaneously the more immediate story of a closed-eyes woman, and that of a man who is standing behind her, with his arms around her chest. He lifts her so as to maintain her body floating above the ground, like a disincarnated puppet. The image, powerful in that it transcribes dualist relations between men and women, originates in the world of dance, a discipline to which Sarah Jérôme has dedicated a decade of her life, and which remains vividly engraved in her imagination and artistic practice.

Sarah Jérôme, Solace, 2018 Mixed media on tracing paper — 180 × 137,5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & la Galerie Da-End

During this year 2019 that will mark the 10th anniversary of Pina Bausch’s passing and the 350th anniversary of the Opéra de Paris, Sarah Jérôme (b. 1979) pays tribute, on the occasion of her new solo exhibition, to the visual genius of the one who invented the pioneer genre of dance-theater in the 1970s.

« The look that Pina Bausch gives on the characters is like a scalpel that cuts into the flesh and the soul, I’ve captured images from Kontakthof and Nelken for what these plays narrate about the disorder of souls, the contradiction of beings and absurdity of human relationships in a world that goes round in circles but doesn’t run smoothly. »

Sarah Jérôme

It is eventually once more question in this body of work of porous frontiers between good and evil, and everywhere the embrace’s tenderness closely flirts with the shadow of a threat.

Sarah Jérôme, Fugue, 2019 Mixed media on tracing paper — 200 × 137,5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & la Galerie Da-End