We meet in the Picasso Museum, which is hosting an exhibition by Sophie Calle on four floors to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death. The first rooms that bear the name are on the ground floor Picalso, reveal the connection that developed during the development of this project between the French visual artist and the work of the Spanish painter. When the artist appears in a summer dress, her face obscured by her famous sunglasses, I point out that she shares her birthday with this art giant, as she herself is celebrating her 70th birthday. She defends herself. Although she was born on October 9, 1953, she claims it was a coincidence of the calendar.
Sophie Calle was therefore 20 years old when the master died. She doesn’t remember: “He had no place in my life back then.”. The first ideas for his unique work had not yet emerged. For this reason, Sophie initially rejected such an exhibition when it was offered to her: “I didn’t know how to confront Picasso. » The inspiration came to him while visiting the museum, which was closed at the time due to Covid. To ensure protection, the works were packaged in kraft paper. “Faced with these ghost Picassos, I could finally imagine something. » She photographed them, it was the beginning of this work about absence. Not to mention death.
When the specter of genius lurks in these rooms, the artist is very present. You could almost call it a retrospective because so many aspects of his life are presented there. The public is greeted by a photo showing her as a child in Nice on the balcony of her grandparents, who partly raised her. It anticipates the playful title of the exhibition: “It’s up to you, my cutie!” » As if for her it was about talking today to the child she was, a wild, lonely, little shy little girl, whose Her parents separated shortly after her birth and she grew up between the south of France and Paris. “Death was part of my life. I crossed Montparnasse Cemetery every day, lived on one side and went to school on the other. And then my father was a cancer specialist. I wasn’t afraid of hospitals because my father ruled there. »
The protected object
On a wall, in the exact format of Guernica (a masterpiece painted in 1937 after the bombing of the city), she hung the works of artists she loves and who populate her own home (small paintings, objects, sculptures) so as not to face this impressive place alone. On the first floor, those familiar with the artist will find some of his earlier works, Blind people, See the sea, etc. The second is this amazing inventory of her own objects, for which she turned to the auctioneers of the famous Hôtel Drouot auction house to create the catalogue. There is a piano underneath. Is she playing? “No, but I always thought that when I ran out of ideas, I would learn the piano and that would save me from lack, tiredness or sadness. What I’ll turn to when I don’t want anything anymore. The protected object. »
Sophie Calle’s work often teeters on the edge of an intimacy created through art that makes the audience feel like they know her. Why tell stories through objects this time? “To be able to detach myself from them, to be able to separate myself from them”, She answers. Wouldn’t it be better to create a material Sophie Calle capable of becoming immortal? She denies worrying about it and yet dedicated an exhibition to her father’s death and another to her mother’s death. On several occasions she insisted on the emptiness that would come after her. The lack of transmission, the childish gestures that are not accomplished. However, childlessness is a perfectly acceptable decision: “I don’t like the attitude of parents towards their children. And the child itself doesn’t move me. I regret nothing. »
On the top floor, a “Catalog raisonné of the unfinished” presents his unfinished projects: “I am someone who keeps everything, even what is not yet finished. Since this is about museography, about an artist’s career, I give you mine. » She recognizes here that this phase of her life is this exhibition “A kind of judgment as I show everything I have done and not done; gave up my house, my possessions, all my ideas, even the bad ones. »
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Editorial news from Sophie Calle
Black in white, Gallimard, €29
Seventy years, almost forty-five of them in artistic creation, in this inimitable way of weaving texts and photos, using reality to tell stories or even allowing them to arise from the small thing, a stranger you meet on the street Hotel room, a separation letter. Exactly sixty-one works. He had to count them because a work had just been published (by Éditions Gallimard), Black on white, which brings them all together in a very strange way: the artist associates each of them with a title from the Série Noire. This is nothing but a new, entertaining way to tell stories.
True storiesActes Sud, 148 pages, €23
If there is a book that allows us to understand Sophie Calle a little better, it is the one with the title True stories, in constant development, which she regularly republishes, each time enriched with new captions. In this year’s work, his grandfather appears for the first time, a Polish Jew who traveled to the United States and stayed there in transit to France. She also talks about the Montparnasse cemetery, her final resting place and the inventory of her friend Jean Lafont’s items. The inventory in question was the source of inspiration for his exhibition at the Picasso Museum. Nothing is lost with Sophie Calle. Everything is transfigured.
