Galerie La Forest Divonne

From September 8 to October 29, Bernadette Chéné returns under the glass roof of the Galerie La Forest Divonne with a set of sculptures in raw and strong materials: cut metal plates, erected trunks, whose timeless beauty is revealed through an intervention as subtle as it is surprising. Here, the metal seems simply cut with a chisel and suddenly reveals a perspective, a play of light or unsuspected shapes. Elsewhere, it is a strong tree trunk in which Bernadette Chéné pierces a window, which she polishes or cuts like a comb. Bernadette Chéné is a transmitter of emotions. In materials so familiar that sometimes we don’t see them anymore, she detects the beauty, the unexpected, the surprising, and gives us to see it. With delicacy, she takes the visitor by the hand, and seems to want to efface herself in front of the material and the forms that she creates, leaving us all to our encounter with the work.

Bernadette Chéné is a visionary. She sees in the simplest things around us what must be revealed, quietly, but with an imperious necessity. In her childhood, shopkeepers used to use « coches « to keep track of customers’ orders: they would mark a wooden stick with a knife at each passage. From this memory, Bernadette Chéné has created a magnificent series of wooden sculptures, with bold cuts, from simple branches to imposing tree trunks, like totems.
Or these large cut-out trunks: who has never been sensitive to the cut of a pencil? Chéné cuts a whole trunk with a blade, polishing the marvelous rings of the wood that one suddenly has the irrepressible desire to touch, letting a pleasure and buried memories come to the surface.