Agathe May — Galerie Catherine Putman
In Agathe May’s universe, presented at the Catherine Putman Gallery, images are grasped in flashes, frontally, almost familiarly, somewhere between the memory of illustrations and the realism of a testimony anchored — and inked — in collective memory.
Agathe May — Par où le chemin ? @ Catherine Putman Gallery from November 7 to December 20. Learn more Yet behind this immediacy lies a patient work of construction. The forms, which seem to burst forth spontaneously, emerge from meticulous processes, from a craftsmanship that makes the material vibrate and illuminates the visions it offers. It is precisely within these tensions — between obviousness and complexity, vital impulse and gravity — that the space of her work opens up. A continuous energy runs through these scenes where everyday life unfolds unadorned.
Nothing is fixed: bodies, objects, gestures from rural or urban life intermingle, sometimes joyful, sometimes anxious, always carrying a sensitive charge. Agathe May reveals reality in its ambiguity; a spectacle of what it is: its often-neglected details, what remains on the periphery of one’s gaze, the tired silhouettes of elders, invisible workers, surrounded by animals for whom it is never clear who accompanies or observes the other. Without judgment, without pathos, she gathers these presences and their blend into a theatre where they may fully exist.
Woodcut printing, which she pushes to rare degrees of complexity, breathes a solar energy into her compositions. The printing circles, the tinted flat areas, the accumulation of ink passages prevent any stasis: the image throbs. A singular vibration inherent to her technique makes figures circulate from one piece to another, answering one another from one medium to the next, building a luxuriant visual banquet where the scenes follow each other like sequences in an expanding narrative.
In Par où le chemin ?, this flow condenses into a vast fresco, a rural landscape where the softness of a familiar setting coexists with the silent harshness of the lives that cross it. One perceives there the thickness of time: the time that wears, the time that links generations, the time that creates memories and sculpts daily gestures. Agathe May approaches it with an almost tender attention, as though each fragment — a garment, a plant, an animal, a shadow — contained a reservoir of meaning ready to unfold.
The exhibition then appears as a journey into the very fabric of the living, where human, animal, tool, built structure and landscape form a constellation without hierarchy. Everything breathes, everything tells a story. And in this continuous circulation, a discreet joy surfaces — that of a gaze striving to render the flow of time, drawing from each grain its possible energy, aware that its unpredictability is precisely what allows it to depict a whole that her work helps us inhabit, for the duration of a journey, differently.
