Carte blanche to… Audrée Wilhelmy | A meeting with Frida

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Audrée Wilhelmy.

End of November and the Parisian gloom: I sink into the chiaroscuro of a staging, in the basement of the Palais Galliera in Paris. In the maze of the exhibition Frida Kahlo: beyond appearances, only the jewelry, dresses and self-portraits of the Mexican artist are illuminated. Visitors go from one colorful lighthouse to another, admire the massive necklaces of jade and silver, the overlapping of petticoats, the painted plaster corsets, the diapered orthoses, the Oaxacan embroidery that adorns scarves, skirts and shirts.

I don’t know how long I remain frozen in front of each of the tehuana, these traditional clothes of the women of Juchitán sported by Frida Kahlo. Consisting of an embroidered square shirt, a long skirt and, on occasion, a celebratory veil, these outfits are associated with Mexico’s only matriarchal society, that of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. If Frida Kahlo chose them as her favorite adornment, it was largely for their political significance: through them, the artist claimed the sovereignty of every woman over her own life.

At the Palais Galliera, the afternoon flows through the darkness of the galleries. I have never spent so much time in an exhibition. I can’t name the dialogue that opens up between Frida and me. It’s not exactly admiration, or rather, there is that, of course, but something goes beyond the aesthetic or emotional pleasure experienced in front of a work of art. I am overwhelmed by the creations of a growing number of artists, without however having the impression of being in front of them as in front of a sister.

And it’s hard to talk about the sisterhood felt between a global icon and yourself. I do not claim the recognition that Frida enjoys, nor do I aspire to duplicate what she has created. I don’t play with the same codes as her and don’t come up against the same barriers. It is not an affiliation. This is not meeting an idol.

The sacralization of this artist disturbs me, moreover: I hear the comments well while the visitors drift from one model to another. Most people only see women as this fixed garment, this dress without a body, this crown of flowers which no longer crowns any idea, any head and this single eyebrow reproduced on millions of cushions, printed on bags, t-shirts. shirts, stationery.

All that remains of Frida are reconstituted traces, swallowed up by a profit-making machine: of her corsets you can only see the painted plaster, the sufferings of the body have vanished.

I’m in front of a black velvet dress, she wore it for a gala. Static in the movement of visitors, I rediscover the idea of ​​Frida’s flesh, I try to hear her breath, to understand what the dress hid from suffering, the fierce armor that she embodied for the artist. I try to imagine the texture and weight of velvet on my own skin. There are certain things in Frida’s relationship with her body, her clothes, her home, her creative life that strongly echo the way I have of conversing with the world.

This open dialogue between us is perhaps above all a matter of human experience strictly speaking. We employ similar mechanisms to deal with reality. I knew quite early in my life that I would not have children. My first gynecological operations took place when I was 22, and at 28 it was already pretty clear that I couldn’t give birth. At 31, after many years of overwhelming physical pain, my uterus was finally removed. Frida, for her part, had multiple miscarriages in her twenties and also realized early on that she would not have children. In the accident that nearly killed her, she was impaled by an iron bar that generated injuries depriving her of the possibility of carrying a pregnancy to term. I wonder if, for her as for me, the impossibility of motherhood is not partially at the origin of the need to create a world of one’s own. Just to create. Isn’t all art born of what is dead and that we want to bring back to life?

It’s not the same thing, choosing not to have children and not being able to have them. Accepting the physical, organic impossibility of creating a family is a long process at the end of which I found, for my part, an immense freedom.

Total infertility releases questions, doubts, fear of getting pregnant, waiting for a small miracle, suddenly it could work, suddenly… When the impossibility is definitive , there is the obligation and the freedom to create life differently. You have to weave the real, sew and unstitch the body, shape it in a way that is not guided by the a priori of others, recognize its roughness, its limits, and transmute them into power.

I look at the splint Frida wore after her amputation. The boot attached to it is beautiful. I haven’t experienced a hundredth of the suffering that this woman has experienced, but I understand intimately what it means to create “despite”, I understand that the mechanisms of art make it possible to build around oneself a world on which one has a take. The drive to make it as beautiful, bright, colorful, magical as possible, the fact of trying to belong to a non-time, in a place that is not constrained by reality: these are self-protection mechanisms and a way to deal with the brutality of the world and of life.

In the basement of the palace, the hours pass and the works speak of the garden, of joy, of pride, of emancipation. I tell myself that perhaps life is exactly like this exhibition: you have to slip from one island of light to another in a world of chiaroscuro. And when I finally go back up the long staircase and get the first puffs of evening in my face, the sun falls on Paris, dazzling like a Mexican dress.