“Il m’est naturel d’aller de-ci, de-là, de dire quelque chose puis le contraire, et de me sentir moins piégée parce que je ne choisis pas une seule version des choses » Agnès Varda
“It is natural for me to go here and there, to say something and then something contrary, and to feel less trapped since I do not chose a singular version of things”, proclaims Agnès Varda (1928-2019) – somewhat emphatically, somewhat prophetically – already in the first room of the first posthumous exposition or her work now on display at the Villa Medici, following its debut at Museé Carnavalet last year. The exhibition Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma will run until 25th of May.
The spectrum of princes and paupers, of irony and humour
Both places seem a natural habitat for her work that inhabits them unassumingly, as did she the makeshift studio next to her parent’s shop and after her atelier on rue Daguerre in Paris, later a subject of her movie Daguerréotypes. The faces staring off the walls dance along the spectrum of princes and paupers, and, as if in parallel lane, along a spectrum of irony and humour: from the delighting Jean-Luc Godard to a shabby Montmartre shopkeeper, and from chained mask trapped in weighty metal chains to a cat confidently assuming its place atop Place des Vosges coffee table.
Varda’s full-moon shaped face, half-hidden under almost schoolgirl straight bangs cutting it in half, has a naturally intrinsic sense of humour that at all times seems to want to proclaim: “aha, the joke is you!”. It is equally the quality she gives to photographs of Fellini, whom she had convinced to travel to the outskirts of the city to be pictured among a sea of rocks, and an unnamed girl in an angel costume stared by passerby with disapprobation she mocks.
Agnès Varda and the freedom rooted in the imagination
Indeed, hers is almost always a double take, as if one had already met her characters of the street, and then turned around to confirm their vision. In that way, her work leaves an aftertaste similar to a fellow Belgian, René Magritte. Ceci n’est pas Fellini, she seems to want to declare, as much as Ceci n’est pas juste une petite fille! Beyond an undercurrent of irony, her work is pervaded by a sense of unrestrained freedom that does not appear to be rooted in overt feminism, but rather in an imagination that has never been shackled.
Indeed, hers is a folly that appears groundedin a sense of humour that prevents her from taking anyone – perhaps including herself – too seriously. It is a folly that has no Dali-like sense of insanity and has no aftertaste of Van Gogh’s derangement. On the contrary, within her double takes and even in the more serious photographs there is a taste of a joyeux bordel, that prevents them from sliding into depressing tones.
The capacity to discover the reality through others’s glasses
Walking out through the Lilliput-sized door of Villa Medici embedded within the Gulliver sized original wood door after the exposition, I could not help but wonder about Varda’s ability to see through others without appearing wounded herself, without the incessant self-wondering that is somehow inherent to artists, and without the melancholy that often accompanies it.
On the last screen of the exposition, somewhere towards the end of her life, sitting in her garden in front of a fake cat, the artist finally lets us on the contours of her answer. The “instability” of her art – by which presumably she refers to her ability to jungle, explore, and bend styles and modes of photography, documentary, and fiction film-making – had been made possible within both the artistic differences and the stability of her personal life with Jacques Demy, a French director to whom she was married for more than three decades.
The permanent instability of images, Agnès Varda’s creative chaos
That admission – she makes without pausing – as if it was the most obvious, conjured up the image of a kaleidoscope which used to fascinate me as a child. Within the stability of its confines, a permanent instability of images that assemble and re-assemble themselves, thrives. It does so somewhat unexpectedly, seemingly haphazardly, perhaps ultimately not so differently to Agnès Varda’s photographs that unfold before our eyes in this exposition – les images défilent – she might have said in French.
Varda’s creative chaos was strongly anchored in a private life that, as a kaleidoscope, allowed her to rotate the images to an infinite multiplicity, without “having to choose a singular version of things”. It was perhaps that fluidity that, in Nietzsche’s words, gave her possibility “to give birth to a dancing star” – the multiplicity of viewpoints that, as shorelines, have been regrettably receding in recent years.
Here you can find Villa Medici’s schedule of exhibitions and events
Here other exhibitions’ reviews
Alissa Kole is a writer, poet director and speaker published in financial and literary press.
