Plus que Passer
by Paul Ardenne, Biennale Chemin d'art
2021The artistic practice of Julie Navarro (France, 1972) is contextual in nature. Each project developed by this artist in search of "unnoticed" relationships (philosopher Yves Michaud) is based on a given situation with which she finds herself confronted. Her perspective is twofold: to open a dialogue - with a geographical location, a community, a form of social life - and to poeticize a relationship. With Julie Navarro, there's no chosen medium: expression comes in all shapes and sizes, from painting and drawing, embroidery and sculpture, to installations, performances and the organization of convivial collective moments (Extravadanses cycle, since 2015). As the artist says of her own approach, "Images and forms emerge as I investigate, through the association of ideas. Working by displacement, I turn real-life subjects and objects into poetic narratives. I seek out the materiality of the invisible, the encounter between the hidden and the manifest, the beating heart of matter."
With Halo, part of the Saint-Flour 2020 biennial, the artist's entire intervention is based on a singular encounter - the large metal porte cochère, pierced with decorative motifs, of a building undergoing restoration in the town center. Julie Navarro's a priori banal artifact is recaptured as an object-metaphor, a mental pretext for multiple evocations: the filtering of sunlight - its "halo" - which draws a landscape of dots reminiscent of Morse code writing; the figure of the hygiaphone, a barrier to inter-human communication - a sort of "allo? "to continue the play on words; the limit and the frontier, hopscotch drawn on the ground or the great cosmic sieve of stars above our heads... A landscape of artistic possibilities opens up. All that remains is to materialize it, in a trans-aesthetic way if possible, by involving the local population.In addition to Saint-Flour, the artist has chosen to settle in the nearby town of Ruynes-en-Margeride, not far from the Garabit viaduct but also on the imaginary line of the 45° parallel, equidistant from the North Pole and the Equator. Ruynes-en-Margeride - until 1962, Ruines, before its mayor changed the name - boasts a toponym rich in imagination. That of ruin, socially sensitive through the disappearance of numerous activities inherited from the past - a pearling industry, in particular, whose memory the artist will recycle by resorting to inserts of colored beads in his local interventions. The artist will also recycle the memory of transhumance - runa in Occitan - as well as that of runes, the sacred script used by ancient Germanic civilizations. In Ruynes-en-Margeride, where she transplants the plastic model of the pierced surface allowing light or words to pass through, Julie Navarro chooses multiple extensions: in particular, she marks the line of the 45th parallel in Morse code "from sky to ground" by planting 242 metres of melliferous blue Phacelia in the town, encouraging conversations with the living world beyond the symbol.
Not forgetting this feed trough for large livestock, with its roof pierced in the shape of a very peculiar bull's eye, which the artist does not refrain from taking all the way into town. Julie Navarro's objective: « To look at the city and its landscape, listening for confidences and whispers, from the ground to the vertical sky, between appearances and disappearances, metamorphoses, forgetting and repairs. » Paul Ardenne