Micheline Simon

Micheline Simon, a qualified teacher of Visual Arts, taught for many years in high schools and at university. She now dedicates herself to her artistic practice and gives lectures on art.

Concretion of time, and not palimpsest as I thought, for there is nothing here of an apposition on an already written text, but rather a revelation on the same surface of a layering of times that resurfaces not through destruction, but rather through reconstruction. “Nothing is decided, things happen to us” and sometimes come back from very far away! What are these things? fragments of images, photos, drawings, paintings, texts, handwritten or printed letters, faces, landscapes, which organize a fluctuating, uncertain space: the drawing of a body, of a work seen, loved, reproduced? images surrounded by printed writings from newspapers, books, handwritten notes, letters, labels… what exactly are these collages made of and what do they reveal? That our life leaves traces, but that these traces, if they return to us thus shattered and dispersed, demand to be re-read, re-assembled, re-thought, to be revealed in this “multitude of glued and superimposed fragments (which) reflects the crumbling, the scattering of the self,” in a design whose lines of force would paradoxically be the flaws, the cuts, the limits, which allow us, in this recomposition of the uninterrupted flow of time, to deeply open these strata of diverse temporalities and thus re-link them on the surface of a present that would define the scattered meaning that still and always eludes us, while it “is about composing this inner complexity to put on a good front” or to escape all definition? and yet what presents itself as self-portraits seduces us neither by this asserted presence of a clear conscience, nor by this escape, this “attempt at evasion ” but rather by the serendipity of this collage, which is constructed in the manner of the surrealists’ free associations, which present themselves raw and would re-draw, with all the force and freshness of these emotions, a powerful life impulse that, jumping from one thing to another, keeps us standing through the freedoms, the breaths, the openings, the in-betweens they allow, because no, the past does not define us any more than our present appearance, and we find in these art materials that weave these debris that randomly resurface without any decision or choice fixing them within us, but rather they become material to open, in fragility, our being to the elusive mystery and complexity of this life force, which, made of bits and pieces, or, in other words, of tears and laughter, of hate and love, of shadows and lights, constructs despite ourselves these figures that are those of art, and it would be thus that these become works; when meaning is not turned inward, but can open to the Other, not through a common and conventional aesthetic but on the contrary through the freedom of its own experience which expresses itself in the uncertainty of its very definition, in its strangeness and autonomy which guides the artist whose work is not the fruit of their will or the expression of a desire but fades from it and allows it to rise to the objectivity of a world in itself.

Evelyne Artaud, art critic, philosopher
Italicized quotes are from the artist

2025
Open Space – Sète 34

2023
La Fabrique Art Center – Montreuil 93

2020
Paul Valéry Museum – Sète 34