From Thursday, September 26, Galerie Vauclair unveils a sublimated interior, presenting pieces of woven rattan, bamboo and lacquer, traces of a “Rêverie d'Orient”.
In this way, she responds to an invitation from the Paul Bert Serpette market to design an exhibition around “Corpus”. But since Galerie Vauclair never does anything like the others, Laurence turns the corpus of flesh to the more subtle corpus of letters; in literature, the corpus is the set of texts chosen as a basis for study. This corpus is the Galerie Vauclair's archives and research on the pieces it has been collecting for over thirty years. This corpus is also the collection that is growing in its repositories, like so many traces of a bygone era. The two bodies of work are obviously linked, for art objects are never more than traces of the body that imagined, modeled, commissioned, pampered and transmitted them. The Galerie Vauclair corpus is dazzling with a thousand hues in the 100m2 of their gallery located in the Paul Bert market (Allée 6, Stand 79), renowned as a place of wonders.
Laurence and Denis travel back in time to the romanticized 19th century, from Marcel Proust's first love to a fantasized, intellectualized Japan, to which collector Philippe Burty gave the name “Japonisme”. The furniture on display, although inspired by Far Eastern models, comes from French manufacturers who admire the craftsmanship. Because Japan was closed (sakoku) to the Western gaze during the Edo period, 19th-century artists and craftsmen worked in the Japanese style.
The centerpiece, however, is a genuine geisha wig, also known as a marumage, a former mistress's chignon decorated with combs and hairpins. This feminine ornament evokes the idea of transmission between the women of a group: each new geisha and her “big sister” have to choose each other so that the younger one can be guided in learning the arts. The hairstyle evolves with the geisha's age, like the indivisible soul and body. This evolution of the woman in the making is recalled by the Proustian memory of A l'aube des jeunes filles en fleurs, in the nostalgic early 20th century.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)