La Bal (details), 2024. Installation, dimensions variable. Xylographs on tinted silk paper © Annabelle Milon
Caractères II, 2024. Xylography on tinted and oiled silk paper, copper
© Annabelle Milon. Photos : ÉF
Text written for the artist's solo show Se faire Autre from October 11th to November 24th 2024, Brasserie Atlas, Anderlecht, Brussels (B).
See also
Se faire Autre
We Are Happy Here in A Happy House
Faire flamboyer l’avenir
The artist’s website
Annabelle Milon
I, you, they, we, you, they. I have known Annabelle Milon since her grandmother lived in a small town in the Pyrenees. I know her work through a friendship woven over the years from the Rue du Soleil to the Spanish border, from Madrid to Catalonia, from second-hand booksellers to precise breweries, from the Barrière de Saint-Gilles to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from a first coffee to a glass of natural wine. I know her through visits under the lights of her studios, where the walls are covered with dozens of figures, where paper and images impatiently await transformation into works of art, where her gouges and printing press keep watch. I know her as an engraving.
The obvious refrain that I’ve tried to avoid since first encountering Annabelle Milon’s recent work continues to resurface, so I give in: Car Je est un Autre1. Arthur, this is nothing against you; your words resonate, yet they’ve been echoed so often that they feel worn out. But, hell, I face it! This is precisely what Annabelle Milon addresses in Se faire Autre, exploring the interplay between the one and the multiple, between herself and others, and the intimate link between otherness and identity. It reflects the universal continuity of what the human creates as images of itself, artifices and artifacts that – by reversal – become norms to follow. A schizophrenia of body representation, of the illusory Western fantasy, and the freedoms promised by social masks. Annabelle Milon’s works evoke these points of passage among the diverse functions of models.
Seeing is an act; the eye sees as the hand grasps. Our hand can hover near many things that nothing compels it to seize; our open eye may scan over many things that remain, in the physical sense, invisible. [...] It is not enough to create an object; it is not enough for it to exist for us to see it. We must show it, which means, through some artifice, to ignite in the spectator the desire, the need to see it.2
In her latest creations3, the artist collects and gathers numerous representations from various eras and territories, inspired by museum collections, digital and advertising content. Her iconographic choices create a back-and-forth movement between familiarity, consumerism, and uncanny strangeness. In doing so, she composes a typology of the double, of the imaginary Other, bearing witness to the persistence of this figure among those who, throughout time have created images. Mannequins, masks, figurines, automatons, dolls, robots, puppets, the artist appropriates these fictional doubles, at once mirrors of ourselves, models, and vectors of values.
By exploring the properties of engraving and printmaking, Annabelle Milon places these projected beings on the same plane and questions the very ontology of the double: in itself both unique and one of many. Thus moving beyond the mere question of the images, she highlights a nearly obsessive gesture: one constantly seeks to become Other. She has made this solid, precise choice of a medium that — as it long was for ceramics — remains underused by contemporary artists, unjustly left in its history. With Se faire Autre, it becomes evident that the artist highlights the breadth of printmaking and its derivatives. While early engravers focused on disseminating information by flooding the world thanks to reproducibility, today this intricate medium invites us to slow down our gaze. At an era when images proliferate on the web, Annabelle Milon suspends time to interrogate these “randomic” notions of flow and dissemination.
The artist tells me that “engraving is to think and work in reverse.” Thinking in reverse so that the hidden image reveals itself only in mirror form upon lifting the paper. To engrave one is, therefore, already to think the other, both identical and perfectly distinct. Yet it is through the looking glass – like Alice4 —that Annabelle Milon questions this otherness. Pressed onto deliberately transparent silk paper, the images initially reveal themselves to the artist as they are engraved. For her, the reverse becomes a place, the right-side up. In the installation Le Bal, she chooses to showcase this particularity, typically confined to the studio. I am also intrigued by how this recent installation unfolds, confronting monumentality for the first time. Here, as in Caractères, the artist engages with the unique multiple, where images repeat but are never the same. She composes her works in layers. Thus, the Other, always itself, is always other than itself; as many times as there are contexts in which it is placed and lights under which it is projected.
Unlike an Atlas or an obsessive collector, Annabelle Milon approaches her work through a funnel. From a vast collection of images—ranging from ancient representations to DIM advertisements, from the artist’s wooden mannequins to the clichéd reflex of the selfie, from Etruscan sculptures to a beauty mask—the artist applies eliminations. What remains is a paradoxically broad reduction of representation, idealized bodies and figures, phantasmagorical icons, humanoid objects. While some artists content themselves with collecting and collaging images, Annabelle Milon cumulates strata and layers. The Carbone series results from photogravure printing on carbon paper that has been repeatedly used to transfer her drawings onto wooden plates. The resulting stratification reveals the imprint of successive iconographic choices. I also appreciate the gestures she allows herself without waving it. Augmenting, redrawing, modifying, rectifying, adapting these images; deleting a detail, words, or adding a face to the shield of an ancient warrior... She redraws her collection. Playing to reveal better. Like a mirrored gesture to what she questions in this research.
It was clear to me to place new pieces in dialogue with some older works, creating bridges that anchor a genealogy of the artist’s concerns. Variations marks the emergence of collages, fragments, accumulations, notes, and hors-champs, while Objectif introduces multiplicity and color. The latter now occurs more intense, sometimes vibrant, in the procession of Le Bal and in Fenêtres, abstract works that create images, both intrinsically and within their exhibition context. Like Paupières, five little windows quietly open5. Rich in layers of grays, they evoke the mineral, the vegetal, the carnal, the non-figurative. It is always delicate and courageous to show a new work; here, I see affectionately how Fenêtres and Paupières open up Annabelle Milon’s artwork. Making images without images. The beginning of abstraction.
RIEN mais RIEN qui soit RIEN.6 I is multiple, hence why we embraced this text with four hands—the freedom of the eye should have warned us long ago.7
Émilie Flory and Vincent Timsit
Brussels, October 2024
1. Sentence written in a letter from Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Demuny on 15 May 1871. For I is an Other, translation by the autors.
2. Paul Nougé, René Magritte ou les images défendues, 1943.
3. References to works produced by the artist in 2024: Le Bal and Caractères.
4. Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871
5. Paul Nougé in L’Expérience continue, 1966. A collection of poems and essays conceived by Nougé with the friendly and attentive assistance of Marcel Mariën and published by Les Lèvres Nues in Brussels.
6. Paul Nougé, La publicité transfigurée, 1925. NOTHING but NOTHING that is NOTHING, translation by the autors.
7. Paul Nougé, La vision déjouée in Fragments, Éd. Labor - Fernand Nathan, 1983
Vincent Timsit is a PhD candidate in Sociology of art at the EHESS, Paris. He is a member of the CRAL (Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage, EHESS), an associate member of the GRESAC (ULB, Brussels) as scientific collaborator, and a member of the BAMLab research group (Brussels Art Markets Laboratory, ULB).