Anne Moreau

Born in Paris in 1948, Anne Moreau studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués (advertising, photography), the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (mural art, painting) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (sculpture). Her work has been exhibited in France - notably in the museums of Dieppe and Nemours, and in the CACs of Saint Brieuc, Mulhouse, Troyes and Belfort - and abroad: Holland, Sweden, the United States, Italy and Portugal. Since 1980, she has exhibited regularly at Galerie Sabine Puget (formerly Galerie Jacob), Galerie Pome Turbil, Galerie Mirabilia and Chez Amélie du Chalard (Paris, New York).

She travels rivers and canals aboard Pick au vent, the barge whose hold is her painter's studio, before settling in a lock keeper's house on the Canal Latéral de la Marne. Since 1998, she has lived in the Charente region of France, where she has benefited from a grant from the Ministry of Culture DRAC Poitou-Charentes.

She experimented with fresco painting, opting for unframed linen canvas, then in 2002 for geotextile canvas, which became her preferred medium.

Through the frugality and gentleness of her canvases, ANNE MOREAU offers us the infinitely helpful present of a presence transformed into an open-air mine of sensations. Like Jean-Pierre Abraham in François Dilasser's paintings, we can camp here without feeling cold.

The colors are simple, picked with their roots: the long reach of the ancient use of ochre earth, the red of sinopia, azure blue, chalky whiteness. 

The forms are those of a structure, walls or dykes, most often with openings that give way to an elemental, flooding fluidity, where limits melt away - have their foundation, disappear. 

Pairs are formed that are original: life and death, stone and water, masculine and feminine - they engender a symbolism that has been present in cave art since before the dawn of history. 

The writings are a step aside, an inverted anchorage (attachment?) in becoming: the line had become a letter and had split into a form and a meaning - separated, separating; it returns to its sources. 

Everything cohabits. And yet, where the world is dispersed, we are no more than Little Thumb or Red Riding Hood. We must live on the waves and never have an asylum in time,” said Rilke. But here, entrusted to a bath of revival, the image blooms like a Japanese paper flower. 

Exchanging their identities, responding to and spreading into each other, pictograms melt into each other: water is a sky, a labyrinth becomes a flower or a meandering brain, as well.

Text by Jean Planche for the exhibition “Demeure” Galerie Mirabilia