PORTFOLIO The Dreams and Marvels of Coco Fronsac Born into a family of artists in 1962, Coco Fronsac has been scouring fl ea markets nearly every weekend for some thirty years in search of old family photos in which the random individuals’ stories have left the hands of those familiar with them. Over the years, she has assembled an ever-growing collection of old photographs, most of them anonymous, dating from the nineteenth and fi rst half of the twentieth centuries. These are an integral part of her expressive artistic vocabulary. While their original function as mementos has been lost forever, Fronsac gives these photographs a second life by integrating 130 them into her work. Most of them were taken at life’s milestones (birth, communion, military service, marriage, etc.) and express the norms and conventions of the social conditions of their times. She works with their solemn, sometimes hieratic, and often stereotypical poses and alters the imagery with overpainting in gouache. Over the years she has created a number of series of these images that, while distinct, all relate to one another, together comprising her corpus of pictorial work. They explore issues of memory and identity under such evocative titles as Né(e) sous X (Born Under X), La mort n’en saura rien (Death Will Know Nothing of It), and Trous de mémoire (Memory Lapses). In one of her recent series, Chimères et Merveilles (Dreams and Marvels), she has painted ritual masks from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and even European folk tradition masks, onto these photographic portraits. The result is captivating imagery that blends radically different yet contemporary artistic expressions with traditional situations. Fronsac clearly relishes the discrepancies and oppositions of form and color that emerge in these works. She accents this by populating her images with colorful animals, tropical plants, coral, and anatomical insets. As a granddaughter of the surrealists and the avant-garde artists who were the fi rst to “discover” the so-called primitive arts and used them to revitalize their own civilization, she immerses us in a dreamlike yet humorous universe in which the combining of cultures engenders marvels. Chimères et Merveilles is also a vibrant homage to the artists of these movements, and she inserts imagery from their works into her compositions. The artists themselves—André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Francis Picabia, and many others—also appear as characters in her scenes. Even her titles contain allusions to surrealism and to the automatic writing that was so closely associated with it, such as Ceci est un parapluie, ceci est un chat dévorant un oiseau, ceci est ... (This Is an Umbrella, This is a Cat Devouring a Bird, This Is a ...) and Le pentacle, le Yup’ik et l’Alyte obstrétican (The Pentacle, the Yup’ik, and the Midwife Toad). These “cite” the non-Western works, as if to better preserve them. Similarly, she takes great care to photograph the original faces in the images before beginning her work so they can be preserved in her archives. For her second show held this year in conjunction with Parcours des Mondes (and the fourth exhibition of her work produced by Galerie Vallois, which fi rst showed her work in Paris), Fronsac presented a hitherto unseen and resonant series titled La Belle et les Bêtes (Beauty and the Beasts). Here she is working in the wake of La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères (The Love Life of the Spumifers), Georges Hugnet’s 1948 compendium of paintings and drawings of female nudes and imaginary animals on postcards. She used photographs of courtesans and studio models from Alexandre Dupouy’s Galerie les Larmes d’Eros as the backdrop for this series. On them she paints non-European masks that are reminiscent of “animal” representations (literally and metaphorically), adding lush jungle plants and fl owers, fl ying or crawling insects, or imaginary creatures. If the obsessed lovers in Hugnet’s Le Purlaine Orgueilleux (The Conceited Woolleton), Le Torchas Casqué (The Helmeted Flarer), La Dragoulette (The Dragolet), or Le Promidan Cornu (The Horned Promidom) were to cross paths with Fronsac’s belles, the encounter certainly would be both striking and burlesque. In revisiting and synthesizing cultural differences and the media of photography, painting, and sculpture, Fronsac sheds a thoroughly contemporary yet playful and animated light on the non-European art forms that inhabit her imagination. By Valentine Plisnier FIG. 1 (above): Portrait of Coco Fronsac styled as an homage to the celebrated Man Ray photo, Noire et Blanche. Photo: Michał Sitkiewicz and Paweł Sokołowski, Street Collodion Art. FIG. 2 (right): Coco Fronsac, Ceci est un parapluie, ceci est un chat dévorant un oiseau, ceci est ... 2015. Gouache, found antique photo. 17.5 x 23 cm. Artist’s collection. All of the works reproduced in this article are from the series Chimères et Merveilles.
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