Sorbonne Artgallery

Aesthetic modernity has often been associated with framing. It replaces the representation of objects with the definition of spaces. Baudelaire’s modern eye, sensitive to the fugitive, captures the sway of a festoon or the clouds that pass through the sky. He places a window on reality to cut out a movement. Anne Deleporte also looks at the clouds, but to guess the lightning there. She follows their flashes and collects their passages of light. The luminous phenomenon, whether coming from the sky or from the revelation of colors, is at the heart of his work. 
 
Papers revealed
In New York, in Queens where old presses still stand, Anne Deleporte collects papers and newspapers, amazed by the first falls that precede the appearance of typographic characters. This moment of liquid casting on the paper makes colors vibrate and reveals lights and lines that then disappear in the information that will reach the readers. The artist preserves this fleeting passage by taking away the first proofs, often mistakes, as the ink is not properly fixed in sentences. All colors are present, available as a labile palette where randomness and accident, relegated to the waste of the newspaper, become phenomenal moments. 
Before the "news" of the world, fragments circulated on the paper that Anne Deleporte maintains in this status of hidden and revealed: without being yet visible, a writing is lurked there in the form of flashes. The scriptable has disappeared, or at least these sheets have been inked and encrypted by a phenomenon that escapes reading to pass under the regime of a spectacular paradox: not the display of the inscriptible, but the presentation of a luminous intensity that steals, cuts and furrows the juxtaposed leaves. The artist constitutes the deposit that she exposes by sequences of striated spaces. 

 

Flashes and destinies
These linear and colorful lines, Anne Deleporte sees them as fulgurant flashes that have crossed the frame of the paper. They are combined, in her artistic work, with the objects she sculpts and calls 'lightning stones', a three-dimensional concretion of lightning. From the thunder, these mythical stones have received many interpretations since ancient times, supposed to conjure bad spells. Such a fascination with lightning comes from the fact that Anne Deleporte survived this blow of the fate fallen on her and which made it a 'fulgurate'. The fulminant energy, when the lightning strikes a body, completely eviscerates the struck person and leaves them alone for months. She later gave him a culture of the storm and a kind of magnetism that she spots in the passages of light. Without giving in to spiritism, she cannot avoid questioning this abduction from the sky and wondering why she was chosen to receive lightning and testify about it. 
By exposing her sheets crossed with lines, she transformed randomness into necessity, like a destiny that declines from her electric body to the hatched papers. A distracted eye could see in its spaces of colors beautiful abstract paintings; however, they rather expose streaks of fire, electromagnetic fields, scintillating gleams, red, blue or green, in the frenetic search for a point of discharge. Their anarchy reinforces all the more their speed and urgency. 

The history of art testifies to the fascination of certain artists for lightning. Georgia O'Keeffe was painting them; Walter De Maria wanted to provoke them with his lightning conductor fields in New Mexico. "Anne the lightning" carries them inside her. She knows too well the risk of attracting them to approach them, but her body and mind remain linked to their presence. She spots their intense tracks and shows them to us after they come out of the clouds. Anne Deleporte’s fulgurances come from her kinship with what has gone through her: she knows how to look at intensities. 

 

Sneaky lightning

Experience and the artist’s eye offer this gift of recognizing an electric charge to capture it and communicate its memory, like a star whose luminous trace can be seen long after its disappearance. On the papers of which she exhibits the cuts at the Sorbonne Art Gallery, Anne Deleporte produces a series effect for these traces that seem to follow lines, as if lightning had leaked from sheet to sheet. It does not remain an image whose illumination we passively receive, and prefers to compose rhythms that generate pulsation and speed, like beats of energy. 

In a neo-classical style venue, these flashes instill an unexpected brilliance. From her studio in Queens, where she collected her papers and inks, the lightning streamer exports lightning to Paris-Sorbonne, in this space created by Yann Toma, an artist also connected to light energies.   One fears the effects of short circuits in the buildings of the August university attended by lawyers and economists. Constellating this gallery which has regained its original meaning as a passage, the works of Anne Deleporte, without legends, have introduced lightning in secret. His flashes, conducive to the charging and discharging of glances, give to experience the fulgurations of thunder on a sheet of paper. 

 

François Noudelmann