josette rispal

Josette Rispal, born in 1946 on the side of a volcano in Auvergne, is not an artist. She is not just a beautiful hand that would work where she is told to work, she is an authentic creator. In the sense that everything she undertakes, what she touches, what she breathes, is transformed, transfigured, re-created.

As early as the 1970s, and almost in secret, she has been tracing a luminous path that can only be explored with daring eyes. If the qualifier “atypical” has not been emptied of its substance, then it is rightfully hers. Just as she cherishes and loves to surround herself with art brut creations, she stays off the beaten track. But she sticks to it in her own way. Of course, the ancestral shamanism and magmatic poetry of her native land offer us a tiny access to her work. But nothing, however, is totally delivered. Neither in his dolls, modest but baroque rags whose ornaments are like the sedimentation of the stories of their former owners. Nor in his glasses - disputed in the fire - which veil and reveal their inclusions with the light. Nor even in his look-outs made of cardboard, a poor material if ever there was one, whose solemnity competes with humility.

For Josette the ragpicker is also Josette the Venetian, and others who are just waiting to appear… to disappear. Her accumulations are maneuvers of burial, her outbursts are attempts to dazzle. The profusion contrasts with the little.

The secret to survival sometimes wears these restful masks.

No matter, codes must be transgressed and she does not deprive herself of this, never being quite where you want her to be. Josette Rispal’s work does not offer the comfort of tidying it into an agreed category, nor the comfort of believing it to be outside the realities of today’s art.

It is played out elsewhere, where the profane and the sacred find their common source, upstream, in the forge of telluric art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 112-page catalogue published by Skira-Flammarion.