THE FALLS
AGNÈS
GEOFFRAY
For Agnès Geoffray, the epigraph of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel The Falls was a vision. Words taken from the Diary of Dr. Moses, written at the end of the 19th century, exposing the symptoms of hydracropsychism, a sort of Stendhal’s Niagara Falls syndrome: «the eyes of the bewitched victim are staring and dilated», the eye hypnotized by the cataract, the will of the crushed soul, the body is chained to its fatal disgrace... If a strong arm didn’t hold it back, strong to the point of fighting against the insane suction of the void.
Under the title The Falls, Agnès Geoffray has made images from her vision: reproduction by capture, stereoscopic views, 19th century glass plates of anonymous people, engravings by old masters, press photogravures, book covers, and stagings with women, hands, butterflies, eyes. The collection of old representations, their captures, document games of emptiness and heights, of admiration and fascination: figures at the edge of the precipice in the manner of William Gilpin’s 18th century landscapes, or contemplating sheltered a foaming white train, tightrope walking; tumultuous water games that run towards the gaze whose bubbling flow could sweep it away, rears up in the distance just before the crash falls on frail homes, fighting the rescue of an unconscious woman, supported by the strong arm of a man treading the waves. From landscape shots to romantic shots, an invisible thread is woven. Air and water are found in the staging of female bodies and of an environment that emphasizes their loneliness: a woman under the water, sitting in a white floaty dress; on a promontory, the blue of the dress sculpted by the wind playing with the luminous varieties of the sky and the sea. Between the figures, alone or in pairs, and the location in depth or height of the heroines, a body vibrates lost in a humid cloud of molecules due to the collapsed tons of water.
One waits for a body to fall. You won’t see it, Agnès Geoffray whispers. The drama is in the gaps, like the devil in the details. Between the time of desire, which is a flight, a delight, and the time of the ravished body, dispossessed of its own orientation, there is the vertigo of being torn away. Agnès Geoffray’s images oscillate between two ways of taking flight. Two ways of expressing the «transport»: in the clouds of a reverie, or in the sea-spray erasing the fall to the body.
Everything is played out on the periphery of the spectator’s eye, where images dance, contaminated with hydracropsychism and the «transports» of delight and its collapse. Because The Falls goes back to the great imagery field of Madame Bovary’s century. Agnès Geoffray has extracted and produced a game of spatiotemporal gaps. None of these images stirs the rage of a gaze, and the round woven by an invisible link fades indifferently like a suspense from the effect of a nature - that Agnès Geoffray does not compose, and that one qualifies as sublime - to states of romantic loneliness of the body and the soul, between expectation and bewitchment. Trance is at work. Both transport of air and water, passage of highs and lows, nears and fars, and crossing of space in time between imagery, old images, stagings. The gaps between form and passion of the imagination compose here and there internalized sensations. The invisible thread weaves what the soul keeps silent.
The vertigo of the contemporary is the operation of a lost thread but free to renew a link under the regime of the sensitive. Hand with a red thread on the ring finger, moth, faceless eyes, floating women in troubled waters or facing the wind ... it seems that there is no connection, where are the falls? We are astonished as if we were at a projection, waiting for a shot that takes a long time to come and that, in the end, does not arrive. The fact of waiting, of anticipating a sequence does not exist without the images except of those we make for ourselves, like bodies that make us fantasize, create visions where all inclinations are possible. Agnès Geoffray dodges the shock, the monstrum, the demonstration. Not showing the fall is an art and an exercise in muscular resistance: to free yourself instead of raging with pain over the loss. Making an image here amounts to creating beginnings: less a bait or a seductive moment than a fuse of indeterminate length which may not reach the powder keg. No butterfly inside the net. On a black background, the wings animate flights and falls. No wedding ring around the finger marked with red,... but a thread with endings free to twirl, bound and unbound according to the wind.
Resisting the panel of resemblances, playing against its most illustrative forms, countering the collapse or the psychopathological model, in fine, The Falls is the haunting of visions: the «staring and dilated eyes» call our imaginary drifts. The games of discrepancies do not go along with the image of a disastrous reality, they dance and jump on the retinas as on the walls. Agnès Geoffray shows the strong but supple arm of a partner with whom one dances for the first time. Everything moves while everything is fixed, overflows in spite of the edges, an art rendered to its floating power. It is up to the spectator to fall, to dream, to fantasize a new inclination, the body in the empty space of its solitude, the gaze no longer responding, absorbed by the vertigo of visions.
Corinne Rondeau, art critic