Anne Brunet

Dialogue with angels

Halfway between Paganism and Christianity, the works of Anne Brunet are like ex-votos, or cadavéras. Celebrating death and the survival of souls, art is no longer here to serve men, but rather to serve angels: it opens up a dialogue between heaven and earth—a world of images from which it becomes possible to communicate with the beyond.

Dieu - Anne Brunet

Dialogue with angels

"Death goes about her work in life, she does not go on an adventure as the fearful imagine (...). No; she says: I'm here and if anyone wants to learn from me, let him come.”
Søren Kierkegaard

Halfway between Paganism and Christianity, the works of Anne Brunet are like ex-votos, or cadavéras. Celebrating death and the survival of souls, art is no longer here to serve men, but rather to serve angels: it opens up a dialogue between heaven and earth—a world of images from which it becomes possible to communicate with the beyond. And what if death no longer corresponds with the end of a vital process, but is rather a continuation, on another level, of that which is eternal in the life of man? And what if death, as Socrates asserted, does not mean pain and misfortune, but rather the release of the body and the reward of the wise?

Turning Catholic iconography on its head, deriding its usual seriousness, Anne Brunet invites us to the celebration of a faith whose scope and depth mixes with the beauty of the works that support them. Whether in her series of drawings entitled “God,” or even in her ornamental work on figures of angels, a clear religious silence seems to turn her work into true effigies, in other words, living symbols of a “faraway nearness”— a “Time Crystal” capable of bringing back those who are no longer here. A step beyond Walter Benjamin and his reflections on the aura, in the time of her supererogatory exhibit, Anne Brunet revives for us the auratic power of art. May peace accompany this work.

Frédéric-Charles Baitinger

Artist