Leyla Goor generates a time filled with wide pages of entangled grinning characters. We’d swear she’d torn them just as they are from an unlikely Persian Bosch only to reduce them to mere signs. An upside-down alphabet of organic signatures, a cartographic, esoteric, carnivalesque script, a bunch of disparate fragments putting together, in fine, a world which, for all the anarchy of its organization, was nonetheless perfectly unified. This is what suggested the lesser of her swarming drawings. The proliferation of detail, operated with a love of the tiny and a joy of the dizziness it causes, spoke the world with dread and rapture, while giving it, inexplicably, as through magic, the appalled character of a moving entity. But then, rather than forms, void started proliferating, like an invisible vegetation on ever more “un-saturated” spaces. Leyla Goor had become Chinese. Came the islands and the mountains, and the islands and the mountains put on weight in the void, put on weight only to tell more truly of the lightness, more deeply of the fierce joy of gravity. All Leyla Goor, become Chinese, tended then gracefully towards a renewed abstraction, an incarnate abstraction, a sensual, absolutely feminine one, teeming with momentum, strains, mobile serenity.

Ann Guillaume was meanwhile organizing interrupted cavalcades, suspended gestures, wrecking scales, and had the silence roaring, through a riot of crude white, dead trees, and impeded architectures. Here too, the void was linking forms together and everything seemed haunted, the smallest diving board left useless, the lesser clump of grass, the poorest human group, distraught ; and the immaculate, inscrutable space which separated all these elements also articulated them. (This wasn’t, believe me, the lesser of her paradoxes, this was not her sole spell). All of Ann Guillaume’s work was a mute love story with ghosts. Ghosts that she would stalk in piles of sand and parking lots, in totally indecipherable child plays, in the straw to be guessed under weird animals, most certainly stuffed. Just like Leyla Goor, though with a whole other perversity, I guess, Ann Guillaume built up secret codes and invented childish incantations. It was like she applied herself to get fear itself to laugh through crooked structures and atonal and deafening graphic poems. Useless to say, the reunion of Leyla Goor and Ann Guillaume had everything to entice and to scare one as well. And actually, with little more than twenty drawings to their names, they offer a dialogue, an embrace, a crash of their respective metaphysics. More than ever, we are given to see and mock at the physical world through its disturbances. See how they alter perspectives and disguise scales, how the colour of the first worries and laughs in the violent blacks of the other, high-angle shots next to low-angle shots inside the same picture, see the way all of this appeals to your brain, your heart, your skin. It’s up to the eye of the viewer, then, to find its place in this accumulation of forms, perspectives, folds ands points of view. Subdued dizziness, seeking after itself. Take good note that both artists settle (precipitate) with their particular and distant lexicon. Ann Guillaume grants the canvas some of her familiar subject-matters, changes them into objects, and then these objects, into measuring devices. Scale measuring, immediately put to pieces by Leyla Goor’s eccentric and solemn strikes. Ann Guillaume roots, or she pretends to root, she invents a ground for the void, suggests anchorages through proposing elements laid down on nothing, like they’re stopped in their fall. Leyla Goor confronts them with her floating, rootless landscapes ; landscapes envisioned like portraits, sinuous verticals, broken all the same. They give so much flesh to the invisible, leave so much pulse to beat and sap to flow in the blank surfaces they leave on their sheets of paper that they almost come to eroticize metaphysics.

When we add the way Ann Guillaume and Leyla Goor deconstruct and reconstruct the mixed legacy of Flemish primitives, of surrealism before surrealism, of the most ancient Chinese art and the most conceptual contemporary art, we can only be left amazed and wondering. Dreamy and clever, precise and casual at the same time, these two playful and thoughtful artists turn up like serene Furies in the small world of art with their modern archaisms and their exhilarating gift to invent inexact sciences and fevers.

translation Héloïse Esquié