“You can imagine my embarrassment when Florence Wagner offered me carte blanche in her gallery. And if, as I like to say, I’m a user of the visual arts (sic), if I sometimes seek out ideas for theater, if I like to surround myself with the works of my friends and especially to hang out in the studios of painters or sculptors, I have no right to improvise as a curator, and at my age I’m not going to embark on a career as a curator (of exhibitions, that is). Yet I had to honor this invitation. I searched my inner repertoire; of course, there was Sophie Coroller who let me accompany her work, but she’s already an artist at the Wagner gallery!

So I risked a proposal: for quite some time, I had been intrigued by the watercolors Sophie Loucachevsky showed me. I was familiar with her work as a theater director; We had even collaborated recently (or in the past?) to create the Théâtre-Feuilleton at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, an adventure lasting more than a season. Since she had moved away from the theater, Sophie had returned to the old and good habit of drawing and painting. I still remember her production notebooks, where the notes she took were more drawings or sketches than words or phrases, sketches of characters or figures, generally in motion. Kinetic sketches, I can clearly see them again: this attention to movement, staging as choreography. And also the attention to costumes, a common thread, so to speak. The memory of the theater has retained Madame de Sade’s costumes at Chaillot… Everything is still there in these watercolors.

Still, this work is a far cry from the style of the Florence gallery; she had told me that these carte blanche were an opportunity to take a step back. But from there to… It was with a certain trepidation that I showed these watercolors, South African seascapes in which very young children are splashing about! With an enigmatic peculiarity: these children are seen from behind! And then came the twist (sic): Florence, visibly moved by these works, welcomed the proposal.

I said enigmatic: I couldn’t solve this enigma, and I’m not a purveyor of meaning. But coming from a woman of the theater, the gesture is remarkable: like a reversal of perspective; the director places herself on the other side, behind the characters, instead of facing them. Moreover, she doesn’t face them and erases their faces. As if it were necessary, through this reversal, to shelter herself from the drama, and leave the landscape as it is and the children out of reach.”

Jean-François Peyret