MARCHANDE DE TAPIS: FLORA MOSCOVICI
I've always felt an uneasy chill when I've heard someone use the expression "avoir de beaux restes", to refer to a particular person - usually a woman. Often they even added the word "encore": "elle a encore de beaux restes". It gave me the impression of talking about a dish left at the end of a banquet, with a few appetising morsels left here and there.
In painting, however, the expression already seems more acceptable. Art history is replete with tales of canvases cut up by unscrupulous dealers, disgruntled or needy artists who needed to sell several small works quickly rather than one large one. In the past, paintings were dismembered because of mould or fire damage, market demands, storage difficulties or the whims of the model. These new canvases were dismantled, reassembled and monetised, concealing whether or not they belonged to a larger composition. The nice leftovers were kept: well-defined faces or bodies in religious scenes, a detail of a chubby angel that would go into a tasteful interior. Shamelessly, we got rid of the trimmings - skies, trees, backgrounds that were too abstract... In the last century, artists took up the issue head-on, such as the 'industrial' painting of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio or the Meta-Matics of Jean Tinguely in the late 1950s.
Flora Moscovici is hardly a vengeful soul, and the point here is neither to save the painting nor to blame the market. But the artist does have something to say about her medium: for the last ten years, she has abandoned the stretcher, preferring the open canvas, the tarpaulin, and very often the wall or the floor. Her work is often monumental, and she is completely humble about it: on several occasions, her works have been used to house others, hung directly on the canvas or wrapped in her torn fragments. The painting exhibited at the Pauline Pavec gallery, L'entremetteuse 2, served as a showcase for several works by other artists at the Art Paris fair last spring. Now presented in a new space, it is destined to disappear, fragmenting over the days according to the choices and desires of collectors. Unlike what usually happens in galleries, where, as a courtesy, people wait until the end of the exhibition to pick up the work they have acquired, the work will fragment little by little. It's up to each customer to choose their piece of the cake, their favourite piece, which will be immediately enshrined and removed.
Buying these works means tolerating the stripping of one painting to create others, which will take on their autonomy as soon as they are cut up, beyond the overall concept imagined by the artist, leaving it up to collectors to decide which are the beautiful leftovers, and which are the leftovers altogether. So, "Marchande de tapis" perhaps, but without the sales pitch that goes with it: beyond the playfulness, ruin isn't far.
— Camille Paulhan
