COLORED RESONANCES

Paressant-Riberzani… colored mirrors and luminous reflections

Under the pen of the exegetes and commentators of Françoise Paressant’s work, the term “jubilation” often comes back. Nothing could be more justified if one recalls the Latin etymology of jubilare (“to shout for joy”), Jubilation being nothing other than the “joyful song” of the ancient crowds assembled for ritual festivals! Jubilation of the eye, enchanted by the frankness and joyful exaltation of this tintamarre of colors that the artist gives to see. But also the obvious jubilation of a creative gesture based on instinct, guided by the imagination and strengthened by experience. Using, for her superimposed or juxtaposed strips, wool as well as canvas, cotton, polyane or paper, soliciting watercolor and acrylic to create delicious effects of transparency and fusion by textile capillarity, Françoise Paressant thus gives, between action and meditation, a priority, never bargained, to the material.

In fruitful dialogue with the contribution of Françoise Paressant, Daniel Riberzani’s capacity to offer a singular reflection of our tormented world, all of luminous glitter, of colored flashes, is verified. Master of vast textile surfaces in the heart of which blaze the nuances of his deliberately baroque palette, the artist also excels in creating, through the tricks of the “small tapestries”, real islands of light, mirrors and multiplied echoes of his intimate disorders and the tumults of the contemporary world… everything happens as if, against the curse of the oblivion and against the misery of the frivolity, he was amusing himself to draw up a crowd of vigorously joyful and rebellious banners Using thus, in their case of miniaturized beauty, the militant nuances of the wool, Riberzani is registered in the pure tradition of resistance which was, and remains, the very first mark of the contemporary tapestry.

Gérard Denizeau