Long wooden panels are covered with translucent sheets of paper which are stacked up, layer upon layer, tone upon tone. They are covered with drawings and cut out windows, recalling advent calendars. Some handwritten names, verbs and adjectives emerge from them while other words vanish into the opacified flesh of the paper as you tiptoe away, only leaving a series of muffled but still intelligible echoes to come through. Layers, strata select and sort out, eventually letting wards and lines emerge, that have been obviously chosen to compose a first level of references.
Within the stemma of each new series of panels, a book layout always serves as matrix. On large white sheets of paper are thriftily assembled images, text fragments (quotes), and listed words. To be more exact, it should be said that in the beginning a pattern is read and unravelled by mental connections - a pattern which is itself the outcome of a surviving image. In the beginning there has thus been the impression of a detail in the memory, whose imprint is comparable to that of a seal dipped in wàx.
ln the shift from book to panel, tracing has the essential role of highlighting the pattern. Tracing is a way of releasing the spirit of the image towards its ghost, a way of stripping it down to select a signalling detail within il. Each saved element, drawing or word, sends a signal. It inserts itself into a network of analogies, a crisscrossing of connections, which cancels the distinction between image and text. One of the first effects of Christelle Franc's work is to recapture in writing the concept of image that existed before words and things were differentiated. The image calls for the word, which calls far another word, which calls far another image: This tangle of echoes weaves a network of meanings which is always looser than a sentence. « It's a whole », as Christelle Franc (born in 1974) insists several times, it's a constellation - motionless cinema, deployed in space like a poem by Mallarmé in his last years.
Here, words and seals convey meaning but also largely spill over what they are supposed to say and which titles are there to stress - The Creation, The Five Senses, The Four Seasons, The Battles. Poems ? Probably, if the space of the poem is the open space of correspondences, of the colliding of subjective and objective experiences ; if it is both presentation of the raw material of meaning in its disjointed elements and unhindered circulation of joint elements through meetings, echoes, hints, suggestions. If it is both the storing or warehousing space of "tokens" - of these subtle and singular materials through which meaning 'comes to things : texts, images, words - and the restrained space of their unleashing.
The space of the poem thus fuses with the space of thought. Its effects of tracing and persistence of the sign are initially the metaphor of the magic square of memory, which fades away and retains at the same time. Unlike the arts of memory, however, what is retained here never builds into a common sense, only into a highly contingent sensitive sense. Looking at these panels or boards so precisely constructed, the only thing that I know is that I don't know anything. If there is any learning device, it is in the sense of 'spiritual exercises', like some self-discipline of attention to diversity, to what you feel and experience, to what you are and become.