Hypersensitivity

Coquettishly lost in the center of her drawings, designer-poet Anne Brunet, incises the open wound of her fantasies. With a patient stroke, always immaculate, the figures that she illustrates are the reverse of advertising images. To virtual harems of pornography, this sensitive and inspired artist contrasts the candor of a world populated by tubby monsters and childlike women.

Returning to the fecund sources of Orientalism, Anne Brunet questions femininity; she portrays the dream of her impossible innocence—the open mouth and the slashed-open belly. Traversing Manet's Olympia, the odalisque of Boucher, and the Turkish baths of Ingres, here the image of the ultra-modern woman comes forward, coupled with her worst nightmare.

Like the distant girl of Madame Edwarda’s wild dreams, here the image of the sovereign and free woman morphs into her opposite. The heady charm of the East has been carefully coated with a thin plastic film and the nubile lips of the courtesans of yesteryear have taken on the threatening and obscure shades of night. Yet even if the erotic aspect of these works evokes the fetishized and fragmented body, it would be a shame to overlook how beneath these battered appearances the call of grace still rings.

Trusting the bird-flower with the sublime task of dressing her dolls in grace, each piece of Anne Brunet seems to consign its fecundity to the roundness of the clouds, to the abundance of shapes, to the floating teardrops; in Anne Brunet’s universe, the motif—sometimes bird, sometimes flower—is the unconscious subject of an infinite desire for gentleness.

Frédéric-Charles Baitinger