“He found the vertical position of that suspended foot lovely, but he regretted that due to the imagination or whim of the sculptor it bore no resemblance to the reality of life.¹”

In a short story entitled Gradiva, Pompeian Fantasy (1903), written by Wilhelm Jensen, Norbert Hanold, a young archaeologist, falls in love with a woman from ancient times at the mere sight of her sculptured image. The sculpture relief, the very essence of the story, deeply affects the protagonist and results in a dream that takes him in the footsteps of the young woman, whom he imagines to be an inhabitant of Pompeii. Fascinated by the position of her feet and focusing especially on the angle of the heels and the way her sandals brush the stones, he “baptises” her Gradiva, “she who makes her way forward”. His fascination increases all the more as he is unable to detect this uncommon bearing in the women he sees every day. Sigmund Freud in 1907 published an analysis of this revelation, which naturally provokes thought on the fascination with Gradiva's walk and stance.
He does not see this as fetishism but as a correlation with the memory of Zoe Bertgang, a woman known by Hanold when they were children and whom he managed to find again (later in life?), establishing as many unconscious beam-like links demonstrating how the present is affected by the past. The search “in the ashes [of Pompeii for] the special form of Gradiva's footprints” is a delicate image that particularly resounds with Christine Crozat's work, a large part of which is devoted to the step, to time and to movement.
According to Freud psychoanalysis concentrates on scraps of memory which are made up of vestiges. This word, from the Latin vestigium means “a trace, a footprint”, here interprets an image that functions as a key for the discovery of the work of Christine Crozat. Reading Gradiva could be a poetic extension of the basic comprehension of her work, which questions with acute perception her own traces, the footprints left by people who have gone before us, whom we have loved, and those whom we might never have known.

Beyond this revelation, it is archaeology's turn to offer us a captivating angle of perception to explore the many links that the artist establishes between eras and an almost sedimentary materialization of time that she investigates and passes through in the same way as she passes through space. In his analysis, Freud delves into “dreams that were never dreamed, which were created by writers and attributed to imaginary persons within the context of a story²”, which corresponds with the approach of Christine Crozat, who composes stories of what could be, in abeyance, a personal dream with collective echoes. She acts as an archaeologist but also as a storyteller interpreting these imprints by becoming immersed in historical or fictional biographies. And many are the works of her corpus which are half and half story and archaeological narrative, between history and legend.

Les Trois Chaussures de saint Césaire (St Cesaire's three shoes) (2002) that she produced from the relics of the eponymous saint are especially fascinating. Frayed shoes³ mounted on soles sewn with a leather lace, sometimes only the sole and a few scraps of skin remaining, believers having removed fragments that would become relics of secondary importance. This act of removal reminds us of the practice of cutting that the artist performs and it was precisely in that tangible state and because of that state that the objects, appearing as the fragile testimonies of a man who lived between Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, were able perhaps to have an impact on her. Inspired by archaeological vestiges and literally by transposing the footprints of this man in resin and olive oil, she brings him rousingly into the present in a sensual and olfactory manner, the oil starting the process of emphasizing the fragility of life emanating from those fragments that have survived across the centuries. We co-exist without knowing it with countless vestiges still hidden and it is in this way that a large proportion of the past continues to exist around us and is revealed by fragments or vanishes with discretion. History and the history of art, both of them accounts built up and transmitted, put us in contact with a long chain of human beings whose decisions have brought about a succession of events that condition us today. The works of Christine Crozat assume that role of transmission, recording and the preservation of the memory of choices, stories and actions taken. Differential preservation and the fact that the materials she uses do not resist equally to the passing of time is an enthralling phenomenon because it bears witness, as does the artist, to the partiality of memory. It is indeed the extreme fragility of these objects that makes her works all the more striking. This would explain her recurrent use of organic and fragile materials such as extremely thin Japanese papers, beeswax or even the flowers she picks when out walking and that she puts in her herbarium to dry. She thus collects and shapes fragments of living things that do not belong to any memory other than her own and which she tries to extract from time by creating new vestiges.

This is an evocation similar to the furtive movement and impression that can be found in the series of drawings of discarded shoes. When she goes out in the car, she can sometimes just make out shoes that she imagines thrown away by the roadside. The disturbing metonymy of an absent body, the object retains a persistent concave presence that continues to haunt the artist. She especially recalls the story, now anecdotal, of how she came across a discarded shoe under a tip-up seat in the metro. Although the metro was crowded, no one dared sit on the seat, as if it was still haunted by the person who, now absent, continued to occupy the space represented by this piece of footware.

This clinging to the notion of presence evoked by traces and vestiges is an image underlining the power of embodiment in the works of Christine Crozat. On paper, she started to give shape and relief to those shoes by hollowing out the thickness from the other side of the sheet, concave and convex, as if to reveal its spectre-like presence, thus applying to the paper an impression made via a technique reminiscent of the documentation of fossils and inscriptions on stones, when a sheet is pressed onto a surface in relief penciled in graphite. As an experienced engraver, Christine Crozat creates from the relief on the sheet of paper the memory of the shape of those discarded shoes, echoing the gesture, as funereal as it is poetic that has allowed archaeologists to give material shape to the unfortunate individuals of Pompeii and Herculaneum by pouring plaster into the cavities created by the ash hardened around the captive bodies now crumbled into dust. That form of impression of the body and footstep is an image which in a way gives extension to the artistic techniques of Christine Crozat demonstrated through various processes: clay and resin moldings, glass blowing, and her collections of used bars of soap or even her cuttings with a scalpel.

The poetry of the imprint of the body in space and time allows us to consider from a different angle Christine Crozat's process of creation aboard trains, a process which is specific to her and which has been likened to a relationship with space. By going further still in our reflection on archaeological time, would not this represent above all in her work, a form of relationship with the passage of time? The concept of time-image conceived by Gilles Deleuze in relation to the cinema of Yasujirô Ozu (1903-1963) could give us the opportunity of understanding this aspect of the work of Christine Crozat, which readily evokes how much Japan presents as a source of inspiration but also of vital experimentation.

She sometimes brings to mind the cinema of Kaneto Shindo, but it is the films of Ozu that enable her to experience true aesthetics and artistic communion. According to Deleuze, Ozu succeeded in making “time and thought visible and resonant⁴” – suspended moments when time stops. Moulded in semiotics, the philosopher develops in his book, L'Image-temps (image-time), the notion of “opsigns” and “sonsigns” which he attributes to Ozu and paternity. A form of immersion which in that landscape evokes the way in which certain filmmakers present a pure form of perspective. The suppression of action thus gives rise to opsigns (designating pure optical images) and to sonsigns (pure sound images), which are differentiated from ordinary signs. The filmmaker renounces the effects of the camera and sound “in favour of the simple cut”, as if to connect with reality. Ozu was not interested in the plot but rather in the details of everyday life - Western critics speak of shomingeki⁵ to qualify this neorealist cinema - which made him a filmmaker of detail, placing daily life and its fragments in intelligent equilibrium, in which the remarkable is undistinguishable from the ordinary. He suggested simple and timeless themes, which conversely to Japanese cinema, so codified and specific, paradoxically makes it universal. Rejecting the great tales of a one Kurosawa to concentrate on gesture, face and detail, Ozu expresses restraint and sobriety to be found in Christine Crozat, who speaks of “modesty” to evoke the cinema of the Japanese master. The two artists have in common this relationship to time through which one passes in contemplative deceleration. By describing this relationship between the ordinary and the movement that permeates the filmmaker's work, Christine Crozat's seems to be hinted at: “The work imprints a stroll (ballad)- shape*, a train journey, taxi ride, bus excursion, bicycle ride or on foot: the object is everyday banality perceived as family life in a Japanese house.” In the same way that trains punctuate the lives of the filmmaker's characters who move, separate and evolve as they move (Travel to Tokyo,1953), Christine Crozat's gaze feeds on experiences and images of journeys, departures and farewells in the environment of railway stations.

Bodily experience is crucial to these memories and emotions. Awareness of the body in diving or low angle shots, in immersion or in search of orientation, is essential for the understanding of her compositions. In this respect, it is significant that she recognizes her own artistic horizon in the “tatami effect”, the low framing so characteristic of Ozu who placed his camera near the ground to take low shots. That framing produces a particular aesthetic effect, built from a hold on the ground which lowers the equilibrium, the gaze and the action, as if to immerse the spectator and then bring them back to terra firma on which footsteps are imprinted - a relationship with space that Christine Crozat often favours, especially in Cobble' soaps and the soap installations, but also more widely in her scenographic devices.

Through its different diversities, Gilles Deleuze's concept of time-image which allows him to think of cinema in philosophic terms, seems - despite the absence of sound - to resonate well with the work of Christine Crozat, especially when he says that “direct time-image gives us access to that Proustian dimension according to which people and things occupy a place in time incommensurate with the place they occupy in space⁶”. It is precisely through this passage from movement to pure optics that she constructs the temporal dimension of her works.

Train journeys, in films, can be used to illustrate conflicts between two worlds or to confront two forms of speed. The train can sometimes be understood as the expression of forces to be submitted to, which exceed the strength and conviction of an individual and, if not a metaphor for fate, perhaps for the relentless power of time.

In French high-speed trains or the Japanese Shinkansen, Christine Crozat's eye and reflection are transformed into a camera enacting movement and therefore time through the time-instilled image. She does not record the landscape in motion but, as in a tracking shot, her own movement through it and a particular sensation of a fragment of duration in suspension. The said capacity of the artist not only to inhabit but also to give that particular feeling of control of time and space in her works brings to mind the words of Umberto Eco, who wrote: “The time I spend on the train is time won for my soul, and that's how I conquer speed. It won't get me. It allows me to reach a place quickly, but it does not erase my interior notion of time⁷.”

It is this same experience of time that the artist interprets by introducing sensitivity to gestures and lines by profitably using the time spent exploring the paper, reducing the size of the sheet, scouring and dissecting notebooks and books. What else would represent these concave gardens created during the lockdowns in 2020 with such curious temporality, these herbaria dug with a scalpel into the pages of books and notebooks, patiently, other than the materialization of minutes, hours and days? This temporality of image seems to be borrowed from what is commonly known as a flipbook with its pages that can be scrolled at speed to create a cartoon. This materialisation of time, through its succession of optic signs on the scrolled pages, does it not remind us by its simple refinement of cinema's reels of film?

In Jensen's short story, the young archaeologist ends up finding in the features of Zoe Bertgang, whose name means “she who is conspicuous in her bearing”, those of the fantasized woman, also allowing Freud to justify his analysis of suppressed desire. One obsession chasing another, the immobility of the relief gives way to the motif of the continuous swaying of the young woman's feet. A true leitmotif, this movement allows the news to be embodied in the work of Christine Crozat, through the film Amanohashidate (2015). Legend has it that the gods Izanagi and Izanami dropped a borrowed ladder into the sea to reach the clouds. The ladder, made up of a pine forest winding across the sea, forms that landscape called Ama no Hashidate or “the bridge to paradise”. History does not tell us if they were in Gradiva's footsteps, much less if they found her. Still, it was by taking this bridge that Christine Crozat, suspended between earth and sky, was able to mark the clouds with her own imprints.