Toulouse. Brigitte’s flowers announce spring, and not only
Spring is coming, but it is for two reasons that the large flowers of the painter Brigitte Masson celebrate it until the end of March at the Canal-Sud gallery in Toulouse. They also tell of a breath after long months of the Covid crisis.
Brigitte Masson, the return. After a first exhibition in 1998 and a second in 2004, inspired more than ever by nature, she returned to the walls of the Galerie Canal Sud in Toulouse with a series of drawings and paintings as a way of rebirth. Emerging from a misty, stormy or finally radiant background, large flowers like so many exclamations of life proclaim the long-awaited spring. But not only. Because the large formats that capture the eye are at the end of a path started in solitude and confinement told on the first wall. There are small formats of glued paper, lists of names covered in endless ballpoint pen spirals.
In the spring of 2020, deprived of her loved ones, driven from her stove by the Covid (because she is also a restorer, not of paintings, but of small dishes), Brigitte finds herself leafing through the telephone directory. The last in paper edition, specified the sending. These names by the hundreds, like so many people suddenly deprived of the possibility of seeing each other, dance before his eyes. His blue pen then covers them, like the spring wire of old landline telephones. The flying pages are so many exit authorizations that others will conscientiously transfer to go to the grocery store. On one of the pages, finally, appears a small flower. “It had to come out!”, slips the painter, who from paper, moves on to starched sheet by changing format, then to large canvases, and to the flowers that she offers with an ample and joyful gesture.
These flowers, which explode with the rabble energy of a graffiti artist facing a forbidden wall, speak of relaxation when emerging from the health crisis. Another crisis has since unfolded. So, say hope?