Créer c'est résister
Avanti popolo
"Traces. Multiple faces, composite figures, anonymous people who are not so anonymous after all. The work of Pierre Marquès has, for ten years, been interested in the remains, in the little spaces between the past and the future in which we construct ourselves. In Memory, its very matter, its substance. From the land of the extermination camps of Treblinka and Sobibor (vanishing buildings, snow, birch trees) to the ruins of concrete Olympic facilities in Sarajevo destroyed by the war, the question of memory runs through his recent work like a bullet or a mass grave. To create is to resist, he tells us. To remember is to resist, one might add. Memory as energy, fuel for creation, and for resistance? Resisting? Resisting what? Resisting how? For Pierre Marquès, resistance is above all an act, the act of the painter. It is when we act that we stand up in opposition; painting is above all movement. The movement of the scissors that cut out a stencil, the movement of the street artist trying to escape the police, the movement of spray paint by the wall. The movement that turns the negative of the stencil into the positive of the image, the movement that adds one face on top of another face to render it anonymous. Images dripping with memories, dripping black, purple streaks. We resist through painting, but also through the written word. This bilingual sculpture of words adds a third dimension, a new depth to the images. Text and voice are part of this resistance. Words, in front of paintings, with paintings, resist immediate interpretation; they fashion a new course, a new alliance. These ten authors are as very much superimposed voices, just as they are Anonymous. These texts are as irreductible to their authors as the faces are to the names they may bear. Resisting what? Resisting oblivion, certainly. But also withstanding “the crisis” - crisis of conscience, of memory, economic crisis. National crisis. Crisis of remembering the crisis. To create is to resist the absence of creation, to enchant, to populate, repopulate, restore meaning to the word "people." Between yesterday and tomorrow, find the energy of the people today, people who are not an anonymous crowd, but a collection of men and women calling on yesterday and on imagination in order to build the future."
Mathias Enard
Translation Stuart Mudie
