NOW’S THE TIME
NATHALIE TALEC
I recently rediscovered a set of very early images. I don't really understand their nature, but they seem to be the source of everything. They're like the harbingers of an obsession. It's a series of self-portraits taken in an abandoned mountain refuge. It was the late 70s. I was in my early twenties. At the time, I knew nothing about art. I don't understand what drove me to take these pictures, which don't suggest anything in terms of references or examples. They show me lying on the ground, wrapped up, snuggled up, alone, eyes closed, motionless in a pile of snow, like a castaway. What was I doing there? Why did I photograph myself? I wouldn't dare speak of a performance, as the notion was so unfamiliar to me at the time. I didn't want to share these photos with anyone. They were just between me and me. I can't explain them today, can't figure them out, but they already contained everything that would later shape my work. Probably my first works of art. It appears, then, that all my work is an attempt to go back to this source, to recapture these buried, enigmatic, primordial images. [...]
Ever since those first photographs, I've had the feeling that I wanted to bring to light an obsession, a trauma that had been kept silent. This mental breach appeared at the end of the 70s and led me, from 1983 onwards, to create fictions, doubles and simulacra capable of blurring or concealing a state of dual consciousness. From the first self-portraits, which always falsified or disguised a distanced relationship with the world, to the works produced today for the exhibition NOW'S THE TIME, the silence on this disorder has remained complete. [...]
Today, however, I feel a compelling need to return to the sources of my obsessions, a willingness to open up this breach, without which no work should have seen the light of day: by revealing that subterranean, uninhibited part of the work, the part that escapes consciousness, that dares shamelessness, the part that assumes asperities, heterogeneity, disorientation, desolation... This character, which I've been trying to conceal since the beginning of my work, is none other than my own - conscious but unstructured, multiple, agitated – sometimes appearing in the form of a young girl, sometimes as a shaman or a sea monster. There is no hierarchy in the chosen images, nor in the techniques. It's merely the result of a vivid imagination, of a permanent reappropriation, of a mental sedimentation, almost autonomous, that absorbs and restores everything it comes across and that can't be stopped by anything. [...]
My obsessive activity is essentially based on collage. It allows me to wander along new and sometimes paradoxical paths. What's so intense about collage is that it dares to cut, to carve, to mistreat, it allows pirating, copying and recycling, and it doesn't require any invention. In these combinations and accumulations of images, there is the idea of a heroic parody without greatness, which, like all exploration, has its moments of success and failure. [...] Whether it's a drawing from a 14th-century book of hours, a childhood drawing or a polar observatory photograph, I move them around, rearrange them, transform them and confront them, without ever inventing them. And this remains equally true today in this new series of paintings Coming back to my own..., or in this brand-new piece, which, in the guise of a juvenile female figure, acts as a metaphor for the inner-child. Clearly, there is some sort of identification with this omnipresent, worried, naïve and naked little girl, who finds refuge behind images that simultaneously envelop, conceal and protect her. [...]
There's only one purpose to our journey: to define our position. We're crossing an unknown land, unaware at all times of the depths to be revealed by each new glance, but our pace remains the same.
- Knud Rasmussen
Nathalie Talec
Excerpt from an interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais, "Ecrits d'artistes" collection, Éditions Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2023