Ramifications / Branching exhibition

Coco Téxèdre and Colette Grandgérard, two committed female artists, are reunited for this new Parisian exhibition to mark the 20th anniversary of Galerie Nathalie Béreau, which is being celebrated throughout the year.
In a nod to this anniversary, we have selected a group of works by the artist Coco Téxèdre spanning 20 years of creation, with themes that echo each other across the decades and also echo the new sculptures by Colette Grandgérard.
Ramifications, the title of the exhibition, means “to divide into secondary elements, especially when talking about plants”. The exhibition unfolds, creating a dialogue between the works and the artists.

Coco Téxèdre, based near Chinon, works on the motifs of trees, grasses and pollen, considered as primordial natural units, but also as graphic entities whose lines are reminiscent of writing. Writing has been an integral part of the artist’s work from the outset.
From root to branch, from leaf to twig to pollen – in a few strokes – the artist captures the fundamental creative power of Nature, evoked by texts in automatic script, a kind of mantra urging us to respond, at the very least, by respecting and admiring its beauty.

The Trees, Pollens and Botanica series each take up this principle in their own way.
And the feminine is linked to this vision of nurturing nature.
Tote bag (2021) is a work of this syncretic vision: on an old linen shirt, the artist has pasted drawings of pollen. Women and nature are thus closely associated in a foldable work that can be carried under the arm like a tote bag!

Women as subjects of emancipation in the face of the violence denounced by the artist can be found very early on in her work.
With Cibles (drawings from 2004), she was already developing the idea of banal violence, which would become more demonstrative with her later installation Ribambelles. The colours are bright, the texts funny, the form round and light, but the sense of purpose is there.

It’s with just as much humour that Coco Téxèdre is working on the series entitled Les culottes mémorielles / Memory panties, which she began in 2011. Using old postcards, mainly depicting the châteaux of the Loire, the artist has drawn on them – like an embroiderer – lace panty designs. She plays with codes and historical ‘monuments’, hijacking them and putting femininity back where we least expect it (castles, monuments to the glory of …). It’s a way of recalling the importance and role of female power throughout history.

Colette Grandgérard started out as a painter and draughtswoman, but since 2000 she has concentrated on volumes in the form of installations and sculptural objects. She works with a range of materials, such as tarlatan and wire mesh, where colour resonates with the intensity of her 2D works. For the Ramifications exhibition, we have chosen new works that are part of two completed series, Books and Characters*.
These sculptures bear witness to the bridge that the artist has been building between different geographies, practices and cultures for over 20 years. Sharing her life between France and Benin, Colette Grandgérard has developed different techniques: bronze in Benin, paste of cristal and, more recently, raku in France.

In Benin, where the practice of bronze-making is based on unwritten, ancestral know-how and very strict rituals, the more technically codified practice of pâte de cristal and raku in France. Far from being opposites, the two practices complement each other.

Her themes, linked to a great curiosity about life practices and cultures that can be found from one country to another, certainly stem from her training as a sociologist researcher and university professor. Practice and theory are therefore intertwined, and her questions challenge us. The bronze figures, with their oversized hands and feet as if to get a better grasp of reality, wield scissors whose meaning takes on different forms depending on the culture. The artist has already worked on tools and objects such as needles, funnels and suitcases, revealing various aspects of our collective and universal culture.
The more massive formal aspect of the book suggests other concerns for the artist: how to work with a transparent mass, to give the idea of pages leafed through or torn in bronze, to make us feel the disappearance of the book through burnt renderings, opaque crystal paste, words that escape, or patinas from another time…

Beyond this research, this time she takes us into her dreamy imagination, even if certain references such as bells or the Devil’s interval remind us of the artist’s knowledge and humour.
Nathalie Béreau, May 2024

*All Colette Grandgérard’s sculptures are unique pieces.