Events

Ray World exhibition

art
exhibition

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sat. 13 Apr. - sat. 4 May.

The Schlassgoart gallery is pleased to host in its space at the ArcelorMittal Centennial Pavilion a panorama of the work of visual artist Ray Monde. This exhibition salutes the artist's return to the country after 40 years of absence. To be absolutely exact, Ray Monde made a stop in Dudelange in 2003 at the Dominique Lang gallery and in 2004 at the Nei Liicht gallery. Since then, she has remained very discreet on the national scene.
Born in the early sixties in Luxembourg into a family of four children, Ray Monde, from an early age, showed a rebellious and non-conformist character. To escape the contingencies of a somewhat austere and strict daily life, the young girl willingly withdraws into her inner world where she nourishes her already abundant imagination. As if it were obvious, creation imposes itself on her who fills her school notebooks with sketches and
drawings. Naturally and undoubtedly with an ounce of transgression, she chose to turn to artistic studies. This is how she left Luxembourg in 1981 to follow a university course in Visual Arts at the Sorbonne Paris I for 5 years. At the same time, she enrolled in classes at the National School of Decorative Arts as well as in the workshops of La Grande Chaumière. As the mysteries of existence torment her, she takes
philosophy courses at the University of Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze and participated in seminars with Michel Foucault.
Ray Monde subsequently constantly combined his artistic practice with philosophy which allowed him to open up to an infinite number of questions about identity and self-fulfilment. Indeed, the artist's plastic approach goes beyond eroticism or a phantasmagorical universe but is closer to philosophical and sociological research.
Ray Monde today readily describes his Parisian years as
sublime. She paints, she writes, she feeds her inspiration from her anthropological and metaphysical research and creates an anthropocentric artistic universe. The body, his body then becomes his medium. “My images embody the nostalgia of a perfect elsewhere with the prestige of a kind of magic, the escape towards a different horizon, on paths of otherness, towards a radical change of scenery from oneself. I question the historical and hysterical condition of women. The one that involved the tragedy of being a woman, where the mirror did not reflect images. I probe the consciousness of my
body. », she writes.
This is how Ecce Femina is born and the artist's body then becomes
iconic, a quasi-sacred image of women not subject to the gaze of men. She photographed herself from behind, playing with light and the color red to create these immense letters X made of flesh and blood. XX, the female chromosome. A strong, living, universal symbol.
Sometimes, some have been tempted to describe Ray Monde's work as feminist, let us say instead that his art is a testimony, that of an artist who rehabilitates the image of women, reattributes to them the enjoyment of their body and their senses. , makes her body and that of all women speak, like an intercessor.
The artist thus fights against the images of women with which advertising bombards us. Stereotypical images of a body having lost its sacredness and reduced to a mercantile function.
In 2010, the artist left Paris for Switzerland. Settled in Berne then in
2012 in Tour-de-Peilz, a stone's throw from the house where the great Gustave Courbet resided during his exile from 1873 to his death in 1877. It's a new start in a new country but Ray Monde is coping, wonders on the concept of “Financial Art”, on the over-aestheticization and standardization of art and on a certain sanitization. She then developed a new project in her image,
solar, benevolent, universal. “Caress the world” then takes shape through his own hand in the form of cut-outs of mobiles symbolizing caress. This initiative hits the mark and has a worldwide response. The visual artist presents it in around fifty countries but its takeoff is stopped by the Covid-19 pandemic. The vagaries of existence meant that Ray Monde left Switzerland in 2022 to return to settle in Luxembourg.
Return to the origins for the one whose work often refers to the deepest roots.
Nathalie Becker, March 2024 See less
Esch-sur-Alzette