Anne De GelasL'amoureuse

The Peinture Fraîche bookshop is pleased to welcome Anne De Gelas on the occasion of the re-edition of her book L’amoureuse published by Loco. The book launch will take place on Thursday 4 May from 6 to 9 pm at 9 rue Lesbroussart.

“T, my lover, the father of my son, died on 5 April 2010 of a stroke. He fell next to us on a beach in the North Sea.

The violence of his death placed me in front of a great emptiness… a silence that resounded in my head echoed by an intense blue sky of the absence of a plane due to the ashes of an angry volcano, my anger. Faced with this loss, I sank into my daily diary work that I have been doing for more than 10 years, writing down my suffering but also this overflow of life that was boiling inside me.

This experience, as intimate as it is, I recognised it in the words of others who very quickly approached me to talk about their experience of death and bereavement. These wounds, which are difficult to talk about, rarely find an interlocutor, and yet this exchange is so necessary because a deceased person takes on a little life through shared words.

This book is the diary of a bereavement, a pause, a convalescence and the life that goes on despite everything for the other members of the family. The diversity of the mediums used, texts, collages, drawings and photographs, makes it possible to tackle this very difficult and fragile theme.

About Anne De Gelas
For this artist, the photographic image has found its place in diaries, travel diaries and artists’ books, alongside texts, drawings and fragmentary archives. This expression, beyond autobiography, has always been considered by Anne De Gelas as humanism, since this annotation of daily life refers to a universal need in man to represent the course of time and of his life, as well as to transmit. I am not the heroine of my work, there are no heroines or heroes,” she says. “The narrator? Let’s say that I unwind the thread. My body is my working tool, it is through it that I can best express the feelings that run through me or upset me. My material is my life, rather life, I tell it sometimes in bits and pieces from an angle chosen according to themes that are dear to me, it is not in fact an autobiography.

This book is a revised edition by the artist of “L’Amoureuse” published in 2013 by Le Caillou Bleu.