Anne Cindric — Parte Incognita — Laure Roynette Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 15 → April 30, 2014

Julie Crenn, Doctor of History and criticism Artsn has written about Anne Cindric’s work:

In continuation of a pictorial reflection based on the pageantry and figures of power, Anne Cindric presents a new series of paintings where the notions of mapping, relationship and mondiality are introduced. Thus, she takes the patterns and history of Dutch wax. Printed and colored fabrics have a story related to colonialism and the beginnings of globalization.

In the nineteenth century, the Dutch are developing fabrics near batiks, elaborated to flood and conquer the Indonesian market. A company that will prove to be a failure, Indonesians preferred the authenticity rather than reproducibility of their craft. The merchants then back on the West Africa where the tissues have been and are still very successful.

From the 1950s, the period of decolonization, Dutch wax carry a new function because they are vectors of “Panafricanism” and various propaganda. On shirts, loincloths, dresses and “boubous”, people wear portraits and slogans of kings, liberators, martyrs, dictators, settlers, heroes and other national and continental icons. Tissues become critical, political activists weapons. An iconographic strategy that Anne Cindric reinterprets in his paintings. Male figures incarnating power are replaced by portraits of medieval favorites, queens and First Ladies: Queen Elizabeth II, Jackie Kennedy and Michelle Obama. Women with limited powers, whose status is between action and representation.

Inspired by Persian miniatures, the artisanal textile art, stained glass art or by the cartoon, Anne Cindric affirms a style at once graphical and expressionist. Restraint and liberation interact together , figures and patterns made with precision are enriched with a gesture instinctive in dichotomous relationship that we find in her plastic vocabulary. Each painting is fragmented, several elements are combined. At textile patterns and at female portrait is added the recurrence of recumbent figures (soldiers in armor, lying on the ground, symbolizing impotence, brutality, vanity and absurdity of eternal conquest of power) and work mapping types.

The streets of the North, the rivers of the Southern, the states of the West and the East topographies are mixed in favor of a reflection primarily motivated by the relationship between space and time. The artist reflects the transversality and contradictions of a shared history. Synthesizing and linking territories, times and stories, she restores the cry of “Tout-Monde” (Edouard Glissant): its violence, its plurality and all its complexity."

— Julie Crenn

Anne Cindric, Oh ma chérie !, 2014 Oil on canvas — 114 × 162 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris

With her name came from Sarajevo, former student of the ENA, Anne Cindric painted power, in all its forms: First Ladies at the african fashion, hero fancy, men of war, gewgaws of power, official productions or characters video game or of the great story.

But more than its reality, it is the pageantry ,the decorum of the power that interests him. Apparent authority, only… In Parte Incognita we travel in a map of Tender borrowed from Western iconography and African Wax, as a kind of plastic summary of globalization. This is how a feminine look and adorned she poses to the world of power, to reveal behind the scenes. She seeks to represent a world without gravity, in every sense, both cruel and tender, where reigns marriage of opposites, times and scales, misappropriation, duality and ambiguity.

After solo exhibitions commissioned by the Ministry of Culture for the National Archives, and through the DRAC Limousin for the Museum of the city of Tulle, her work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou by Jean-Yves Jouannais, author of Encyclopedia wars, art critic and former editor of art press, and also on the occasion of the exhibition 1917 at the Centre Pompidou in Metz.