99. PAULE VÉZELAY: A SPACE BETWEEN MARJORIE AND PAULE.
Paule Vézelay: Living Lines, Royal West of England Academy - BRISTOL.
Paule Vézelay, Paysage (Landscape) 1946, Oil on canvas. Private collection, courtesy England & Co, London.
The faded curtains of Paule Vézelay are drawn closed, their function is prevention and yet occasional beams of sun damage remind that in the end, nature will always overrule human intention. The printed cloth is patterned with ‘Parade’ from 1956 - a design the artist created, inspired by French medieval banners denoting the identities of different regions. The symbolic motifs evoke heraldry - the repeated forms reimagine institutional structures - suggest systems with new rules, an endless mass of chess pieces stand in dispersed rows, heraldic crests appear rearranged - original elements extracted to form an identity for its mysterious maker - an identity in review.
Paris was depicted within Marjorie Watson-Williams’ game plan long before they renamed themselves Vézelay - the nonchalant, aristocratic title heralding immediate acceptance, and yet as an artist - Paule's contribution is not sensed within artifact as her fellow surrealists - but in aura and an ability to capture air.
A Parisian born in Bristol - manifested through chalken smudges communicating left bank atmospheres - a Tour Eiffel beam sensed within the hushed cinema of a Bristolian hippodrome - For Paule Vézelay knew that Paris exists not in the logical but in the illogical, in the atmosphere of light and in the magic of nothingness. Long before she relocated to the centre of Paris' avant-garde - Vézelay knew - to be is to become, a journey is more important than the destination.
In 'The Sunbathers', the artist captures the undulating forms of the naked and soothed in a dappled depiction of intimacy, so specific that the canvas could be read as notes for a musician to perform. A visual fluency is at times particularly pronounced, demonstrating the many attempts to translate the internal to the external.
There are signs of patronage within the proofs presented - in the scribbled notes from mentors whose own searching lights inspired followers to become inevitably influenced by their brilliance. Within the works on display, many share a visual tone of materials applied in the idiom of others, and yet who can prove whose defined such methods first, and does that race or measure matter? For Vézelay to capture the air, the L'Air du Temps becomes paramount in a search for self.
Letter to Paule Vézelay from Henri Matisse, 1936.
The returning motif of jigsaw pieces creates intriguing episodes to contemplate - segments which occasionally glide through works, sometimes leaving scorched shadows suggesting traumatic past events informing a present - still in motion. This sense of time and missing elements of information allow for further confusion - as a ground has grown over preventing an order of play from forming a whole - forever to not fit as they once did. In 'Strange landscape' these familiar pieces return again, this time to stand on end as a figure awaiting their next movement - a dancer on pointe - agile and alert, exhausted from waiting for instruction.
A further visual depiction of puzzle pieces - now rotund without irregular edges appear more as sacks filled with helium to gently move on their own accord, as balloons, buoyant and gentle - their formless wholes no longer silhouettes against an opposite to fill, their apparent function no longer to be toyed with but to float alone into nothingness.
In 'Paysage, painted in 1946, a flurry of organic ephemera appear strewn across a surface. The viewer watches a scene of disarray, as our eyes rest on each piece of a jigsaw which was never intended to fit to form a whole, we realise that this still-life is levitating above a ground which casts no shadow, a life stilled. Such scattered seeds formed by nature, pre-spring unfurlings, tender freckled shells and foraged saplings, embryonic moments of hope, weightless and whispering, gasping in the sunlight as if new to an earth still in its dormancy. As the sun rises to burn a horizon rouge - ‘red sky at dawn - a shepherd's warning. And so for Vézelay, whose flock of shadowless unfurlings symbolise a life snapped short, as a cruel storm severs a wartime generation from their chance to mature and flourish to see the day ahead.
Paule Vézelay, ‘Parade’, Furnishing Fabric, Printed cotton curtain with a double-lobed abstract shape in brown and white on a black ground. 1956-1957.
Paule Vézelay: Living Lines, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Until 27 April 2025.