I’ll be your mirror

In the Velvet Underground song, "I'll be your mirror", the singer Nico proclaims: "When you think the night has seen your mind / That inside you're twisted and unkind / Let me stand to show that you are blind / Please put down your hands / 'Cause I see you." These words echo at the heart of Audrey Guttman's work. For her, collage has the same effect as a distorting mirror that, despite everything, sees. Born from an infinite array of pre-existing images - visions torn from old magazines, advertisements, traces of a forgotten past that Audrey Guttman carefully preserves - collage blurs lines. It allows the artist to disappear, to feel safe. However, it is also a revealing agent : each work becomes the reflection of an intense inner life. Alternately crossed by emotions, memories, sensations, collage defies fixed images, their definite and limited meaning. It works with the image like the poem does with the word. By associating visions apparently opposed - in the same way as a baudelairian correspondence or a synesthesia - the artist cracks open meaning, she multiplies it. And allows the viewer to find his or her own troubling reflection, to associate with it a deep emotional state, a secret shape, an intimate color. Thus, each glance will find its unique and singular part. Like a bit of one’s mental life, one’s existence within to use an expression by Michaux of which Audrey Guttman is - and which, in the collage, reveals itself. After having tried all practices and all acts - painting, acting, drawing - collage came to Audrey Guttman as an obvious choice. First of all for its autobiographical dimension. "My identity has never been one and indivisible," the artist acknowledges, "the only thing I claim are my own assemblages." She loved collage, "a modest and humble art, made of trials and errors". Through this intensive practice, the artist saves images that are doomed to oblivion. Facing them is a mix of trance and tenderness: Audrey Guttman leafs through them, searches. She feels, perceives that this vision must be kept, this page must be ripped and not another. A powerful obviousness manifests itself : the image imposes itself to her as if it wanted to survive. So she cuts it out, keeps it. Then she turns around the image, dances around her. She tries an association, lets it rest, waits. Finally, she glues. The next day, she will repeat this act, methodically, like a saving exorcism or a meticulous choreography. Through the magical power of collage, the image is reborn from its ashes. This idea of rebirth is the pulse of the exhibition "I'll be your mirror". As Audrey Guttman confesses: "The planet is burning, the apocalypse is playing out before our very eyes." To counter the announced end of the world, the artist puts a spin on Boris Vian’s famous sentence and turns it in a magical proposal: I will spit ... becomes I will dance on your graves ... Duly noted. Her characters dance on ruins as in A dance for the end of the world where we see an ambiguous dancer waltzing with a nuclear explosion. The end of the world is also the end of images. Faced with the infinite surplus of images that our retinae are forced to consume every day, faced with this new class struggle won long ago by the screens, Audrey Guttman's collages give new meaning to buried images by forcing us to slow down, to take our time, to let ourselves be seduced. For example, she cuts out advertisements where the often naked bodies of women are originally used to promote the sale of this or that product. Audrey Guttman reverses the primary function: she flips the images before gluing them, thus revealing what chance printed on the back of these shots... Collage becomes her weapon. Against the ready-made images of misguided advertising. And against the layers of a social skin that force us to mask our sincere emotions. In The other me, the duality is obvious, the personality seems much more complex inside than on its presentable facade. Like in the work The dinner party, which shows a suitably presentable woman, in the middle of a conventional and stereotyped ceremony, boiling from the inside to such an extent that her whole body catches fire: she becomes perpetually incandescent. In L'attente, the naive posture of another young woman reveals the solidity of a cliff. Audrey Guttman likes to show what bodies hide. She has also created a whole series of « live collages » to capture the body in its naked truth. In a drawing studio, in front of models. And in the voguing class of the Centre National de la Danse. She captured the movements of the body not by drawing but by cutting. Thanks to collage, we are now warned: we must see underneath. And beyond. The inner life and the jubilation of bodies: collage allows these two intimate impulses to be united. To counter a too-superficial social life. To subvert the bodies frozen in one and the same identity or one and the same kind. Audrey Guttman reconstructs a complex, moving and sometimes even dancing world. A fundamentally alive world — of which her collages become intuitive mirrors. They reveal what our skins hide. They give freedom to what our images bury.