Yellow, red, pink chemical pigments, performer in overalls, mechanical gestures: the industrial world serves as a support for the fruitful collaboration between Sophie Delaporte and Melissa Mourer Ordener. In a gigantic visual device, the bright colors of the photographs and videos paradoxically capture threats of disappearance. Bodies slip away, faces hide, words, sometimes barely audible, are lost in multilingualism. Is the hyper-modernity of capitalist societies in question? An anguished voice lists the various “damages” and reminds us that we are emptied of our essential substances to become “brains available” for consumption. (1) “True colors” goes further than these political questions and stages an existential issue: the search for a “truth” about oneself, in a world that gives René Char’s observation a contemporary resonance.
« The essential is constantly threatened by the insignificant », Between absence and essence, the work finds its dynamics. Back to basics! (2)
The story of a collaboration: doubling up to tell each other better
Melissa Mourer Ordener and Sophie Delaporte: mirror games and role playing. So what connects them? Mélissa Mourer Ordener, presented by the photographer as her “muse”, figures in all the images and participates in the unity of the work. Sophie Delaporte remains behind the lens. A series, “Les Chimiques” enlightens us: the performer triggers smoke bombs in a small empty room. This is where Sophie Delporte continued her studies. By propelling Melissa Mourer Ordener into this room, the muse becomes the double of Sophie Delaporte, the one who breathes new life into past student life by investing it with her own passion for the industrial world. Thus, the muse becomes an artist and the artist inspires his muse. We
has never been so close to being “oneself like another”, (Paul Ricœur), another in whom one chooses to project oneself and invest oneself. (3)
Another double: the bedroom, a metaphor for the inner self
The room also reveals the intimacy of the photographer whose face we do not know. Fixed frame on white walls, on an angle, on a window to the dazzling and inaccessible world, intimate eight-closed. Wouldn’t this be the image of the photographer’s inner life? Mélissa Ourer Ordener’s monologues, sometimes confused, panting, revolted, anguished, inhabit the « inner space » of the cramped room (4), and allow us to question the boundaries between the inner world and the outer world. Where does this voice, this thought, speak from? How to react to these fumes lined with worried words? The photographs and videos nourish the ambiguity: smoke bombs or volcanoes, domestic accident or nuclear mushroom, clouds to tell the meanders of thought? Basically, the proposal of Sophie Delaporte, specialist in color, is perhaps this: faced with the hermeneutic crucible of ambiguities, only colors, and their
« truths » capture the gaze seized by the « event » of their presence. (5)
identities not only artificial, but plural, impersonal and disposable? “Ghost Colors” raises the question by revisiting the famous Lacanian episode of the mirror stage. (5) According to the psychoanalyst, the child (between 6 and 18 months) learns to grasp himself as a unit by recognizing himself in the reflection presented to him by the mirror. This is an essential step in the perception of oneself as a subject. In the capitalist world where plural appearances are imposed on us, can we still constitute ourselves as a subject?
Threat of disappearance
This threat goes far beyond that. The lens fixes a suffocating character, decomposing shapes, invasions of half-puerile, half-toxic balloons, object distortions, women’s bodies under torture, but X-rayed necks. – their primaries. The contrast is striking. From the spectrum of colors arises only one
spectral and mysterious universe where the woman becomes a silhouette, almost abstract, symbolically erased, already a shadow… From this perspective, the choice of photography makes sense: it is a question of freezing the movements of bodies and materials as if to defy their disappearance.
Industry, “an enemy”?(6)
The strength of Sophie Delaporte’s compositions perhaps resides in this paradox: if the industrial world is a threat, it also constitutes an extraordinary support for poetry. This ambivalence is omnipresent: the smoke bombs evoke nuclear mushrooms that are both toxic and dreamlike, of an intoxicating pink. The enumeration of pigments in the industrial nomenclature also becomes rhythm, slam, melody and recalls Rimbaud: « A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue » (7) English, the language of globalization which came to threaten the clarity of the French words becomes a song in the mouth of the performer. Finally, the gestures, objects, tools of the world of work are the starting point for choreographic flights that transcend them, in the manner of Dancer in the Dark, by Lars von Trier. (8)
Through this work, Sophie Delaporte and Melissa Mourer Ordener therefore seem to be seeking a truth for the subject threatened by its own disappearance. Colour, poetry and music re-enchant the industrial world. Botticelli’s representation of the performer also offers a timeless counterpoint: that of the eternal feminine transcending eras.
Formula taken up by Patrick Le Lay, former president of TF1: “what we sell to Coca Cola is available brain time”. Details in Leaders facing change. Collective, barometer 2004 Edition Eighth day.
• Ethics of René Char, remarks recorded by Pierre Cahné in “La forme de l’injunction chez René Char”. Poems 1945-1960, words, voice, Paris-Sorbonne University Press (1989) The poet explains that
the essential appears when death is there; this can be a way to feel the event of color as something vital
Seize the essential before everything disappears
cannot be thought without the other, as we would say in Hegelian language. To the like, we would like to attach the strong meaning, not only of a comparison – oneself similar to another – but indeed of an implication: oneself as…other. »
•Play on words based on the title of Henri Michaux’s collection of poems, L’espace du dedans. The writer evokes another universe but its title highlights the approach of the artists of « True Colors ».
•Melissa Mourer Ordener has a passion for the “mirror stage”, a stage that has fueled the reflections of many psychoanalysts. In the context of this exhibition, where the performer is omnipresent and fragmented, the young woman seems to be asking the question of the appropriation of her image as a unit.
•“Industry, bursting into art, becomes its deadliest enemy.” Art critic, Charles Baudelaire, Gallimard, Folio, Paris . This quote sheds light on « True Colors » because the collaboration between Mélissa Mourer Ordener and Sophie Delaporte does not precisely do industrial photography (in the sense of an industry that would reproduce nature), it invents something new from modernity.
•In “Voyelles”, by Rimbaud, color is also an event, in an interesting discordance: Mélissa Mourer Ordener pronounces colors that do not correspond to what the viewer sees (eg “rose”, on a green image). The effect is poetic and makes it possible to appreciate the games on the relations signified/signifiers, in addition to the luminous experience around the retinal relevance claimed by Sophie Delaporte.
•In this film, crowned with the Palme d’or in 2000, the main character dreams while listening to the noise of the machines where she works. These noises become rhythms, sounds, pretexts for dancing.
Hélène Fresnel, Art Critic, Associate Professor
Yellow, red, pink chemical pigments, performer in overalls, mechanical gestures: the industrial world serves as a support for the fruitful collaboration between Sophie Delaporte and Melissa Mourer Ordener. In a gigantic visual device, the bright colors of the photographs and videos paradoxically capture threats of disappearance. Bodies slip away, faces hide, words, sometimes barely audible, are lost in multilingualism. Is the hyper-modernity of capitalist societies in question? An anguished voice lists the various “damages” and reminds us that we are emptied of our essential substances to become “brains available” for consumption. (1) “True colors” goes further than these political questions and stages an existential issue: the search for a “truth” about oneself, in a world that gives René Char’s observation a contemporary resonance.
« The essential is constantly threatened by the insignificant », Between absence and essence, the work finds its dynamics. Back to basics! (2)
The story of a collaboration: doubling up to tell each other better
Melissa Mourer Ordener and Sophie Delaporte: mirror games and role playing. So what connects them? Mélissa Mourer Ordener, presented by the photographer as her “muse”, figures in all the images and participates in the unity of the work. Sophie Delaporte remains behind the lens. A series, “Les Chimiques” enlightens us: the performer triggers smoke bombs in a small empty room. This is where Sophie Delporte continued her studies. By propelling Melissa Mourer Ordener into this room, the muse becomes the double of Sophie Delaporte, the one who breathes new life into past student life by investing it with her own passion for the industrial world. Thus, the muse becomes an artist and the artist inspires his muse. We
has never been so close to being “oneself like another”, (Paul Ricœur), another in whom one chooses to project oneself and invest oneself. (3)
Another double: the bedroom, a metaphor for the inner self
The room also reveals the intimacy of the photographer whose face we do not know. Fixed frame on white walls, on an angle, on a window to the dazzling and inaccessible world, intimate eight-closed. Wouldn’t this be the image of the photographer’s inner life? Mélissa Ourer Ordener’s monologues, sometimes confused, panting, revolted, anguished, inhabit the « inner space » of the cramped room (4), and allow us to question the boundaries between the inner world and the outer world. Where does this voice, this thought, speak from? How to react to these fumes lined with worried words? The photographs and videos nourish the ambiguity: smoke bombs or volcanoes, domestic accident or nuclear mushroom, clouds to tell the meanders of thought? Basically, the proposal of Sophie Delaporte, specialist in color, is perhaps this: faced with the hermeneutic crucible of ambiguities, only colors, and their
« truths » capture the gaze seized by the « event » of their presence. (5)
identities not only artificial, but plural, impersonal and disposable? “Ghost Colors” raises the question by revisiting the famous Lacanian episode of the mirror stage. (5) According to the psychoanalyst, the child (between 6 and 18 months) learns to grasp himself as a unit by recognizing himself in the reflection presented to him by the mirror. This is an essential step in the perception of oneself as a subject. In the capitalist world where plural appearances are imposed on us, can we still constitute ourselves as a subject?
Threat of disappearance
This threat goes far beyond that. The lens fixes a suffocating character, decomposing shapes, invasions of half-puerile, half-toxic balloons, object distortions, women’s bodies under torture, but X-rayed necks. – their primaries. The contrast is striking. From the spectrum of colors arises only one
spectral and mysterious universe where the woman becomes a silhouette, almost abstract, symbolically erased, already a shadow… From this perspective, the choice of photography makes sense: it is a question of freezing the movements of bodies and materials as if to defy their disappearance.
Industry, “an enemy”?(6)
The strength of Sophie Delaporte’s compositions perhaps resides in this paradox: if the industrial world is a threat, it also constitutes an extraordinary support for poetry. This ambivalence is omnipresent: the smoke bombs evoke nuclear mushrooms that are both toxic and dreamlike, of an intoxicating pink. The enumeration of pigments in the industrial nomenclature also becomes rhythm, slam, melody and recalls Rimbaud: « A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue » (7) English, the language of globalization which came to threaten the clarity of the French words becomes a song in the mouth of the performer. Finally, the gestures, objects, tools of the world of work are the starting point for choreographic flights that transcend them, in the manner of Dancer in the Dark, by Lars von Trier. (8)
Through this work, Sophie Delaporte and Melissa Mourer Ordener therefore seem to be seeking a truth for the subject threatened by its own disappearance. Colour, poetry and music re-enchant the industrial world. Botticelli’s representation of the performer also offers a timeless counterpoint: that of the eternal feminine transcending eras.
Formula taken up by Patrick Le Lay, former president of TF1: “what we sell to Coca Cola is available brain time”. Details in Leaders facing change. Collective, barometer 2004 Edition Eighth day.
• Ethics of René Char, remarks recorded by Pierre Cahné in “La forme de l’injunction chez René Char”. Poems 1945-1960, words, voice, Paris-Sorbonne University Press (1989) The poet explains that
the essential appears when death is there; this can be a way to feel the event of color as something vital
Seize the essential before everything disappears
cannot be thought without the other, as we would say in Hegelian language. To the like, we would like to attach the strong meaning, not only of a comparison – oneself similar to another – but indeed of an implication: oneself as…other. »
•Play on words based on the title of Henri Michaux’s collection of poems, L’espace du dedans. The writer evokes another universe but its title highlights the approach of the artists of « True Colors ».
•Melissa Mourer Ordener has a passion for the “mirror stage”, a stage that has fueled the reflections of many psychoanalysts. In the context of this exhibition, where the performer is omnipresent and fragmented, the young woman seems to be asking the question of the appropriation of her image as a unit.
•“Industry, bursting into art, becomes its deadliest enemy.” Art critic, Charles Baudelaire, Gallimard, Folio, Paris . This quote sheds light on « True Colors » because the collaboration between Mélissa Mourer Ordener and Sophie Delaporte does not precisely do industrial photography (in the sense of an industry that would reproduce nature), it invents something new from modernity.
•In “Voyelles”, by Rimbaud, color is also an event, in an interesting discordance: Mélissa Mourer Ordener pronounces colors that do not correspond to what the viewer sees (eg “rose”, on a green image). The effect is poetic and makes it possible to appreciate the games on the relations signified/signifiers, in addition to the luminous experience around the retinal relevance claimed by Sophie Delaporte.
•In this film, crowned with the Palme d’or in 2000, the main character dreams while listening to the noise of the machines where she works. These noises become rhythms, sounds, pretexts for dancing.
Hélène Fresnel, Art Critic, Associate Professor
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