Marie Drouet, Chevelures en mouvement
Since 2007 the artist Marie Drouet, who lives in Nantes, has worked on ink and paper depictions of hair: "hair landscapes", panoramas of graphic threads stretching to infinity, dimensions varying according to the hanging area, "albums", portable works with several metres of drawings within the folds, waiting to be unfurled, "circular hair", hair resembling sea urchins, between 40 cm and 1.50 m in diameter, the smallest appearing in an "artist's book" and, finally, the "framings". The latter items are presented as hypnotic labyrinths constructed around a central void: the hair distends from this yawning hole, indicating an imaginary land beyond the boundaries of the frame.
These variations on female hair are all meticulously rendered in pen and black India ink. The constancy of the process has as its counterpoint the diverse quality of paper selected by the artist for its intrinsic properties: opaque and solid material or, contrarily, an almost translucent skin through which the ink penetrates. Traditional mediums, yes, but ones which perform a change in accordance with the dimensions of the paper and the time required by the work of the pen and the repeated application of lines. This work with its repetition time after time evokes the work of Roman Opalka in its attempt to manifest the passage through time and to bring together the time of creation with that of life.
Maxime Martinot, in his Chevelures en Mouvement (Moving Hair) (a short version of a documentary on the artist) manages to convey this dry, nervy, repetitive and almost obsessive gesture, preserving it in all its tension. His camera, attentive to the scratching accompaniment, follows the rhythm of the artist's wrist from which emanate the thousands of lines which, depending on the space, the quantity of material, the cadence of the application, translate different densities of hair. The hair, like a changing landscape, curls or splits, is flowing or straight, until it creates a sort of inventory of women's hair, in constant movement despite the inertia of the medium.
