Galerie Lara Vincy.

Culinary incunabula and unpublishable journals.

For her second solo show in the Galerie Lara Vincy, Denise A. Aubertin is presenting series of new “Livres Cuits” (Cooked Books) and some “Journaux Impubliables” (Unpublishable Journals).

The “Livres Cuits” or culinary incunabula. If, to describe a rare book, one sometimes uses the adjective incunabulum, it is because we have forgotten its Latin root “incunabula” meaning  “cradle”, “beginning” ; therefore yes, let us describe  Denise A. Aubertin’s works as incunabula. Why? Because since 1974, it is really a question of a beginning, that of a singular corpus, an unusual and Rabelaisian library made up of cooked books.

In the sixties and seventies, there were many artists who worked with food and organic materials, Daniel Spoerri and his « Tableaux-pièges », Dieter Roth and chocolate, Miralda and Dorothée Selz with their spectacular buffets… since the list cannot be complete, we will not mention all those experimenters, brilliant Mabuses, who leavened our daily bread with a light breath of wind, completely decadent, although at times frightening, anorexic and alarming.

However, one needed to have a subversive temperament to combine on the same plane, literature and foodstuffs, Rabelais and red comfit ; and thus, filled with Dada humor, Denise A. Aubertin set out the bases of an intimate and disturbing œuvre, by mischievously cooking up with mischievousness, passion, rinds, almonds,… and polenta, those books that hammer out a critical reflection; sealed by cooking, their contents jealously hidden, they achieved an almost inaccessible, magical status, reifying in so many lay equivalents writings henceforth as unusual as the Saincte Bible of  Louvain, preciously preserved in the Bibliothèque Diocésaine in Nancy.

So what of these “Unpublishable Journals”, begun in 1969, overturning in the Situ manner of a cut-and-paste impacting in equal proportions, intimate history and society’s history ?  Between coffee rings and wine stains, are hidden manuscript texts, whose discontinuity in reading ceaselessly undoes the meaning ; narrowly linked to newspaper articles, they act like screening  souvenirs within an analytical approach. However, a grid does exist.  Denise A., armed with a tube of glue, invites us to read between the lines a personal history, that she enjoys encrypting to provide it with a polysemical and infinite interpretation.

The Galerie Lara Vincy invites you to discover this complex œuvre, made up of two approaches to writing, whose factual difference reveals their author’s attachment for words and their evocative powers.
 

Francine Flandrin
Translated in English by Ann Cremin