The exhibition "Body and Souls" invites us to explore the corporeality of the soul. For a suspended time, Baruch Spinoza's theory, "The [soul] and the body are one and the same thing, conceived sometimes under the attribute of Thought, sometimes under the attribute of Extent," takes the form of an artistic, intimate and universal dialogue between two women. Along the way, the aesthetic sculptures of French artist Sylvie Mangaud and paintings by the American artist René Romero Schuler, reveals the personal experiences, emotions, and doubts that have marked their lives. In the triturated material of the wax that becomes bronze, oil paint that is applied in multiple layers, we detect the asperities of the human condition, the sensitive is exposed.
The elongated silhouettes of Sylvie Mangaud take pose. Disrespectful proportions gracefully stretch naked bodies in search of a canonized Beauty. We find in this slenderness, the eye of the photographer, Sylvie’s first form of artistic expression. It captures this fragile moment where the woman oscillates, between inner movements and social position. These women are called Attitude, Determined, Insolent... It is with the knife that the soft texture of the wax is scarified. Then this relief is softened by the benevolent touch of the artist, a gesture enriched by her cognitive experience of morphopsychology. The sculptures then take human size and confront directly our own experiences. They are called Destiny, Complicity, Charm. The faces of these women have no definite traits, they are all. Only a movement of the head makes the link with the perceptible emotion that emanates from their bodies. The texture that covers them seems to hide their nakedness, because there is nothing obscene in these nudes. They seem draped in their emotions and jolts of their lives.
Even if the women of René Romero Schuler are dressed, their joyful fragility is poignant. They use the codes of abstractive figuration and seem to escape from folk tales to tend towards a saturated, holographic image that makes them timeless. The colored backgrounds seem to express the color of the soul, which is revealed with its nuances, its shade. The superimposed lays of oil painting give rise to a structure resembling a clay-like ground where water, symbol of life, would have furrowed. These women have a unique name chosen by the artist: a singular identity. They are slightly levitating, as if they had detached themselves from the ground roots to reach an emotional and happy freedom that nothing could prevent.
It is the use of the knife, the materiality of these works, the ethereal form of these silhouettes, the reflections of Sylvie's bronzes in the gold of some of René's paintings; but as if by a mirror game, all these women are in dialogue with one another. A complicity of the spirit emerges thus echoing Gustave Flaubert, (The Temptation of Antoine) "For material to have so much power, it must contain a spirit.”